


The How-To Series

by candle_beck



Category: Baseball RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-12
Updated: 2011-09-21
Packaged: 2017-10-23 16:14:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 27,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/252311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/candle_beck/pseuds/candle_beck
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zito is pretty dumb, but it's not a dealbreaker.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Left-Handed Pitchers in Love, or How to Get in Trouble with the Ballclub

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted October 2003.

Part One: Left-Handed Pitchers In Love, or How To Get In Trouble With The Ballclub  
By Candle Beck

 

Barry Zito was drunk. Spectacularly so.

Anthony Pearl, two years out of UC Berkeley’s journalism school and two weeks into his first real job as a reporter, spotted Zito across the bar, through the hazy orange light and the laughter, the late-night San Francisco crowd that drifted and wandered around the dim room like brightly colored shadows.

Zito was by himself at a back booth, slouched down on the torn whiskey-brown vinyl, his elbows up on the table, contemplating a sweating mug of beer, a weird smile that seemed half-regret, half-amusement on his face. Pearl could tell by the slow, careful motions of the pitcher’s hands, the foggy distracted tilt of his head, that this was not the man’s first beer of the evening.

The A’s had lost that night, mainly due to a dismal performance by Mark Mulder, who hadn’t managed to get through the third while giving up six runs on eight hits and two walks, one of which came with the bases loaded.

Pearl had been at the game, trying to hold back his still-fresh excitement at being allowed in the press box, struggling to be professional and not appear too much like a high schooler reporting for the student paper, fighting his urge to stutter and fawn over the veteran stringers whose work he had been reading since he was ten years old, poring over the sports section in the yellow wash of the Saturday morning sun, smearing newsprint on his fingers.

Pearl was new to the profession, but he was pretty sure an exclusive quote from an All-Star ballplayer would be a good way to start his career.

He made his way through the crowd and hesitated a moment before offering his hand to the other man. “Mr. Zito? Um . . . Barry?”

Zito lifted his head, an instinctively polite grin surfacing on his face, before his brow knotted in confusion. “That’s . . . how did you know my name?”

Pearl blinked. Obviously the man’s state of inebriation was more considerable than first realized, if he’d forgotten his status as a very recognizable public figure in the sports world.

Pearl decided to forge on. “I’m Anthony Pearl, I’m with the Bay Area Sports News?” not intending for it to come out as a question. “It’s a real pleasure to meet you.”

Zito had taken his hand, the pitcher’s big paw wrapping around the journalist’s smaller one. Zito stared at him, his brown eyes shadowed with beer and the late hour, his eyelids half pulled down, the gears in his head clicking sluggishly as he attempted to put together the pieces of information he was receiving. “You’re . . . Earl?” he asked, a genuine smile splitting his face.

The journalist took the opportunity to slide in opposite the other man, replying, “No, um, Pearl, actually. Anthony Pearl? With the Sports News?” speaking slowly so as to facilitate Zito’s understanding. “I was wondering if you could comment on tonight’s game. You see, I’m just kind of starting out, and—”

“Earl’s a strange name,” Zito interrupted, taking a drink from his glass, leaving his fingers hooked in the elbow of the glass handle as he set the mug back on the table. “Don’t meet too many Earls, these days.” He cocked a skeptical look across the table, “Shouldn’t you be like sixty, if you’re gonna be named Earl?”

This was like talking with a . . . well, a very drunk man. ‘Good thing you’re not a fiction writer, your descriptive skills suck,’ Pearl chided himself. “Well, I, uh, guess, but I’m not really named—”

“Jack!” Zito suddenly called, waving over a bartender, who came with the world-weary stride of a man who has seen everything, including sloshed baseball players who couldn’t grasp simple words and phrases.

“Jack-from-the-bar, this is my new friend Earl!” Zito announced expansively, extending a hand from one man to the other, introducing them.

Jack, clearly barely restraining an eye roll, asked pleasantly, “Something to drink, Earl?”

“Um, no,” Pearl responded, deciding to stop belaboring the name point, sensing that it would be a futile endeavor.

Zito grinned engagingly up at the bartender, “How ‘bout me, Jack?” awkwardly patting his glass, which was down to its last few swallows.

Jack smirked, “I think we’re gonna make nine your limit, tonight, Bar.”

Zito’s face fell a little at that, but he tried to play it off cool, saying, “Oh. Okay. Yeah, I wasn’t ree-really so thirsty anyway.” As Jack moved away, Zito called after him, “Thanks, Jack!” waving good-bye to the bartender like a kid out a car window.

Pearl, a bit taken aback by the revelation of just _how_ drunk Zito was (‘Nine beers?’ he thought. ‘Jesus, he probably didn’t even get that I’m a reporter.’), attempted to bring the conversation back into focus. “Barry, if I could just ask about tonight’s game . . .”

Zito pinned Pearl with his eyes, with the quick clarity of the exceptionally intoxicated. “Tonight’s game was awful. Hard to watch, you know? You know, Earl? Who throws firty . . . for-forty pitches in the first inning? Jeez.” He shook his head, stretching out his long fingers, drumming them on the scarred wood table.

This was more like it. Pearl leaned forward, wondering if he should pull out his notebook and scribble some of this down, deciding not to jinx it. “So, was Mulder upset?” Pearl had of course heard about Mulder destroying a trainer’s room after he left the game, an encyclopedically filthy tirade audible halfway down the hallway, the pitcher’s temper and competitive nature living up to their legend.

Zito rolled his eyes at the question, reaching up to scrub a hand through his shaggy crash of hair, parts of which stuck up at odd angles and other parts plastered down, still evidencing the hold of his cap. “Of course Mulder is upset, after what happened last night. You expect him to forget about it? You don’t know him too well, huh.”

Last night? Pearl shook his head, trying to draw Zito back to the subject under discussion. “No, I . . . I wasn’t asking about last night. _Today_ , today’s game, that’s what I was asking about.”

Heaving a rushing sigh, Zito said contemplatively, “I guess you could say today was my fault.” He made a sloppy flapping gesture with his hand, “I mean, I don’t th-think it was, but maybe it could be argued that I had something to do with it.”

Struggling to follow Zito’s rambling train of thought, Pearl wondered, “How could today have been your fault? You didn’t pitch, Mulder did.”

Zito scrunched up his face, squinting one eye closed as he fell into a flight of rhetorical fancy, “I mean, is it my fault if he can’t separate per-personal stuff from the field? I didn’t tell him to go out there pissed off at me, that was all his idea, Earl.”

Pearl desperately wanted to take out his notebook now, the hope for an exclusive quote starting to expand into an inkling of a broader story, but he managed to restrain himself. “Are you saying that Mulder pitched badly today because of a fight he’d had with you?”

Zito nodded loosely, like his head was on a spring, and continued, “See, Earl, what you gotta know about Mulder is that he’s a pitcher. Pitchers are weird. And he’s a lefty. Lefties are weird too. So, you figure, left-handed pitchers, they’re . . . a lot weird.”

Pearl rolled his eyes. “Barry, you’re a left-handed pitcher.”

Zito looked surprised to have this fact pointed out to him, then grinned goofily, pointing a finger at Pearl, his thumb up in a gunslinger gesture. “Yes. Yes I am, Earl, good for you. But see, but see, the difference is I’m all weird on the outside, okay? I’ve got stuffed aminals . . . _animals_ and pink pillows and high socks, everyone can see that I’m a freak. With Mulder, though, he doesn’t show it. He’s all kinds of freak, but you never see it on the outside, ‘cause he’s also all kinds of repress-repressive. So he’s mad at me ‘cause of last night, and instead of acting like a regular person and dealing with it, he pushes it down with all his other inner freakness and then goes out there today and pitches like crap. _Not_ an appropriate method of handling things, if you ask me.”

Something about this, something about the casually familiar dissecting of Mulder’s psyche, struck something in Pearl, nudged his newly emerging journalistic instincts, but he tried to stay on course, tried to get the crux of the tale. “What did happen, last night?”

Zito snorted, his hand flickering in unconscious dismissal. “Stupid stuff. Stupid Mulder and Zito stuff. Nothing new.”

Frustrated, Pearl swung his arms up on the bar and leaned onto them, tilting towards the other man, wanting to catch Zito’s gaze and reel him in. “Well, see, I am new, though, so maybe you could fill me in?”

But Zito was off on another tangent, scoffing, “How can you take a g-guy seriously whose first and last names start with the same letter, anyway? There’s no pleasant-sounding contrast, it’s all mmm-mmm-mmm. Saying his name is like trying to gum somebody to death.”

Pearl surprised himself by chuffing a laugh at that, an image of a toothless old man gnawing on a baseball glove springing unbidden to his mind, then asked, “Seriously, what happened last night?”

Zito didn’t appear to hear him, rolling on, “You know his middle name is Alan? You know that, Earl? He never tells anyone, ‘cause when he was a kid they used to call him ‘ma’am’. You know, like his initials. Man, he hated that. Or ‘Moldy’, you know. Kids aren’t very creative.”

Zito slumped forward, leaning his chin on his hand, his elbow propped on the table, rubbing a thumb along the five o’clock shadow that darkened his jaw, and said, his voice going all nostalgic and wondering, “He told me I could call him ‘Mark’ if I wanted. Like, it was kind of weird that we still called each other by our last names after everything that’s happened.”

“Everything that’s happened?” Pearl jumped in, sensing that the explanation of that vague phrase might fill in the gaps in Zito’s narrative, but the reporter’s question was to no avail.

“I don’t know, though, it just doesn’t seem right, you know? He’s Mulder, he’s always been Mulder. That’s the name I say when I talk in my sleep, that’s the first thing I think of when I strike someone out, I think, ‘I hope Mulder saw that.’ Probably it is a little st-strange, though, huh, Earl?”

Zito was looking at him like he expected an actual answer, but Pearl was a bit shell-shocked, beginning to get a pretty good idea of the state of things. His mind was whirring, full of spinning things like ‘is he saying what i think he’s saying?’ and ‘jesus christ, what a story,’ and ‘the boys at the office are gonna go nuts,’ and ‘i can’t write this, can i write this?’ and ‘how drunk is he, he must be so drunk to tell me all this,’ and ‘i told him i was a reporter, i haven’t done anything wrong, haven’t lied.’ There was any number of things going on in his head, but mainly he was just trying to get to the end of the story. “Barry, what happened last night?”

Zito smiled quietly, rolling his eyes a little, “Oh, that. I told him I love him, and he said that I shouldn’t say that, or at least shouldn’t expect a response, and I said he was scared. That’s pretty much when the wheels came off.”

Although Pearl had guessed that it was something like that, hearing the actual words still threw him for a loop. “You . . . you told Mark Mulder you loved him?”

Zito grinned, suddenly taken with the reminder that he was in love with someone. “Oh, yeah. Been wanting to for awhile, ever since Baltimore, when we were out on that dock after the game, and it was pouring rain, I mean like end-of-the-world rain, and he said that he was cold and soaked and exhausted and that I looked like a drowned rat and that there was nowhere in the world he’d rather be. I wanted to tell him then, ‘cause that was the first time I was really sure it was true, you know, like bone-sure, blood-sure, heart-sure, but then he kissed me, so I didn’t really have a chance.”

His fingers itching for a pen, wanting to fill the white paper square of a napkin in front of him with his tiny, cramped handwriting, Pearl repeated, “He kissed you.”

Zito nodded, his eyes looking a bit sad, “Yeah, and probably a good thing that I didn’t get to say it then, judging by his reaction last night. Man oh man.”

Wanting to make sure he was getting everything right, Pearl said, tapping the air with his finger to emphasize each word, “Last night. When you told him you loved him. When you, Barry Zito, said, ‘I love you,’ to Mark Mulder.”

Zito reached across the small table to pat Pearl clumsily on the arm, nearly upsetting the almost empty beer glass that held the space between them. “Glad to see you’re keeping up, Earl!”

Pearl smiled modestly, “Well, I try.”

Tugging at his ear, Zito continued, “Anyway, I don’t think it was so much the me saying ‘I love you’ part as much as the me saying he was scared part. Jeez, I shoulda known better than that. I mean, it’s true, he is scared, but still, calling him on it maybe wasn’t the best of ideas.”

Getting a little caught up now, feeling like he was just talking with a friend about their latest stab at romance, rather than a reporter chasing a scoop, Pearl asked, “What’d he do?”

Zito made another flashing gesture of drunken sign language, his face vaguely distressed at having to recollect the night, “Oh, he said I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about, I didn’t know anything about him. That he wasn’t scared of anything or anybody, including me. _Especially_ me. Thought he was gonna hit me at one point, after I told him he was lying to himself, hiding the way he felt to try and avoid getting hurt, ignoring the fact that the lie was causing pain of its own. Nah, he didn’t particularly want to hear that, either.”

“How does he feel?” Pearl asked. “I mean, what’s he lying to himself about?”

Zito shot him a look as if it should be self-evident, a bent half-grin on his face, “Oh, he loves me. He’s totally, out-of-his-head, stupid in love with me. Has been for months now. He tries to pretend it’s just casual, just a sex thing, no biggie, just a comfort thing between friends, but he can’t pull it off. I wake up in the middle of the night and he’s watching me like I’m some kind of miracle. He’s always finding some way to touch me, hand on my shoulder, knee against my knee, even when we’re just hanging around watching TV, he’s got one leg stretched out so he can keep his foot up against my side. Weird, I know. But then, left-handed pitchers. A left-handed pitcher in love, that’s like a walking disaster area. I should know.”

Zito was so easy, so calmly certain of Mulder’s feelings for him, and something about it made Pearl feel kind of happy, warmed through by the idea of a person out there being certain of someone else like that.

“What happened after the fight?”

Zito shrugged. “He went home angry, went to sleep angry, came to the park angry and pitched like shit. Which I coulda told him would hop . . . happen. If he was talking to me. Which he isn’t. Whatever, though. Let him learn this one the hard way.”

“Learn what?” questioned Pearl.

“Not to pitch angry. And also that he needs me. And that saying it out loud wouldn’t, like, destroy the space-time continuum. He’ll fi-figure it out. It’ll take him a couple of days, but . . . yeah,” Zito nodded, confirming his words.

Pearl raised his eyebrows. “And then you’ll take him back?”

Zito nodded to him, smiling sweetly, his eyes tired and peaceful. “Of course. I mean, I love him. Stubborn son of a bitch, but he’s everything I’ve ever been sure of.”

Pearl’s heart twisted a little at the simple words, and he found himself nodding back, smiling at the other man. The story having come to an end, he offered his hand to Zito again, “All right. Thanks. Good talking to you, Barry.”

Zito grinned, half-rising to shake his hand, “Hey, you too, Earl. You have a good night.”

Pearl moved to leave the table, but only got a few steps before he turned back and said, “Hey, Barry?”

Zito looked at him, his eyebrows up questioningly, a strand of hair dripping in front of his eyes.

Pearl didn’t know what he wanted to say, exactly, and there was a moment of silence before he settled on just, “Good luck, man.”

Zito beamed, lifting his glass to toast the reporter, “Thanks, dude. Right back at you.”

Then Pearl headed out, his mind complicated with all that he had learned, already writing in his head what was destined to be one hell of a story.


	2. Sure of You, or How to Get Your Heart Broken

Part Two: Sure Of You, or How To Get Your Heart Broken  
By Candle Beck

 

“What the fuck did you think you were doing?”

And wow, that didn’t take very long at all.

Mulder was alight with fury, his hands knotted in Zito’s shirt, shoving him against the wall, his fists pressing like nails into Zito’s chest. They were two inches apart and all Zito wanted to do was get away from the other man.

He knocked Mulder’s hands away and pushed off the wall, half his body slamming against Mulder’s as he put a few feet between them. For some reason, the space between them didn’t help at all, didn’t make anything better. Mulder was still glaring at him, rage making his hands shake, and force of the man’s anger was no easier to withstand from three feet than it had been from two inches.

“I didn’t . . . I was drunk, I didn’t know what I was saying,” Zito replied, his own voice sounding foreign to him as he crossed his arms over his chest, unconsciously shielding himself, hanging onto his elbows, cutting his eyes away from the other man.

Mulder’s jaw tightened hard and he spat out, “Yeah, well, the fucking _reporter_ knew what you were saying! And now everybody else in the country does too!” He scoured his hands over his face, pressing his palms briefly against his eyes, and when he took them away, Zito was vaguely surprised to find himself not set on fire by the way Mulder’s eyes were blazing.

The story had broken that morning, a week after the night Anthony Pearl had found Zito alone in a bar and drunk enough to let fly the apocalyptic secret that had been held like something fragile and precious between the two pitchers for half a season. The Bay Area Sports News had run it on the first page, the huge gaping letters of the headline shouting out from newsstands, “The Secret To Their Success,” with an old photo from last year’s postseason of Mulder and Zito in each other’s arms after a victory, Mulder’s hand on the back of Zito’s head, Zito clinging to the material of Mulder’s jersey, both of their faces wide open with joy, laughing like they would never stop.

Zito hadn’t remembered much of the night until he saw it painstakingly recapped in the paper. He had had a faint recollection of talking to someone named Earl in a bar, something about being left-handed and Baltimore and names that kids call each other on playgrounds. He didn’t remember that Earl’s name was actually Pearl, or that he was a reporter, or that he had told the reporter things he had never intended to say out loud. Once he saw the story, though, and read through it enough times to have it memorized, it all came back in a shocking, devastating rush, and he was overcome with the panicked, futile desire to turn back time, take it back, draw himself away from the sickening drop that yawned in front of him.

ESPN had picked it up by the time the first SportsCenter of the day ran, six o’clock in Bristol, three o’clock in Oakland, just in time for the entire ballclub to hear about it before they showed up for batting practice.

No one had said much, at least not to the two of them. Every time Zito walked in a room, the place went dead silent, letting him know what the topic of conversation had been. The other players had avoided his eyes, dressed so quickly in the locker room that they went out to field with half-buttoned shirts and unbuckled belts, like after two years of never thinking twice about changing in front of him, they were suddenly scared he would jump them in the shower.

They’d been called into Billy Beane’s office, but the GM hadn’t asked for anything then, saying simply, his words clipped and sharp, “We’ve got a game tonight. I want to see you both right here first thing tomorrow morning, but for now, the only thing that matters is winning tonight.” Beane had arrowed them both with a warning finger, pointing first to Mulder, then to Zito, “And if either of you says one word to the press today, I mean _one word_ , then you’re benched for the rest of the season. Are you clear on that?”

They’d both nodded stiffly, and Zito had skittered a glance over in Mulder’s direction, but all he could see was the tension strumming out of the other man, the muscle twitching in his jaw, the way his eyes glittered hard and cold like pieces of quartz crushed up in the concrete of the sidewalk.

On their way back to the clubhouse, Zito had tried to catch Mulder, putting his hand on the man’s arm. “Mulder,” he began, having absolutely no idea what he was going to say, just wanting Mulder to look at him again.

Mulder had jerked away like he was burned, and spun to pin Zito with his eyes, snarling, “Get the fuck away from me,” his voice bleeding disgust and something that sounded very much like hatred, terrifying Zito, and then Mulder stalked off, leaving Zito frozen and stunned in the hallway, feeling like he’d been punched in the chest.

And now they were in the hotel room Zito had fled to after driving down his street and seeing the knotted vulture camps that the reporters had staked out in front of his building, all of them laying wait for him to come home, just as they had pounced on him the second he had left the clubhouse that evening.

After the twelfth time he tried to call Mulder’s phone, the other man finally picked up, harshly growling, “The fuck do you want?” and Zito had barely been able to fumble out the words, “We need to talk,” and the name of his hotel before Mulder slammed the receiver down hard enough to sound like a gunshot in Zito’s ear.

He hadn’t expected Mulder to show up, but twenty minutes later there was an impatient rap at his door, and when he checked the peephole, he saw the other man standing in the hall with his shoulders pulled up and his eyebrows clenched down, scowling at Zito through the wood.

Zito didn’t manage to get through the first few words of his shattered apology before Mulder’s anger got the best of him and he threw Zito up against the wall and demanded to know what the fuck he thought he had been doing.

All Zito could say in the face of all that blind, suffocating rage was, “I’m sorry, man. I swear, I’m so fucking sorry, I was . . . I was so fucking drunk.”

Mulder turned away, like having to look at Zito was more than he could bear. “I’ve been drunk. I’ve been drunk and stupid and yet I’ve never ruined anyone else’s life. So, fuck you and your fucking excuses.”

Zito pulled his hands through his hair, feeling out of his body, feeling like he was fracturing, splintering into a million pieces, and he couldn’t believe any of this was happening. “I . . . I haven’t ruined your life, come on, man, don’t say that. This . . . it’ll blow over, Mulder, it’s not forever.”

Turning back, Mulder stared aghast at the other man. “Oh, you think so? You think this’ll just go away and people will forget?”

Zito shrugged, staring down at the floor. “Yeah. Eventually. They’ll give us hell for a little while then they’ll move on to something else.”

“You’re a fucking idiot,” Mulder sneered. “Tell me something, you hear a lot these days about Albert Belle having been one of the best hitters in the game? ‘Cause most of what I hear is about him corking his bat. _This_ is what people remember, this is the stuff that sticks. So now it doesn’t matter what either of us does for the rest of our careers, it doesn’t matter if you pitch a perfect game or I strike out twenty-five men, the first thing people are gonna think of when they hear our names is that we’re fucking faggots.”

And Zito knew he shouldn’t say it, knew it was suicide, but he couldn’t help it. “But we _are_ , man. Pearl didn’t lie, he didn’t make anything up. He got everything right, everything he quoted was something I said. People think we’re sleeping together because we are sleeping together.”

Mulder scoffed a cruel, humorless laugh, “Not anymore, we’re not,” and that hit Zito like a physical blow. Mulder continued, “You think it matters that it was true? You really think that’s gonna make it okay with me? You’re so fucking stupid.” He snatched up a copy of the paper that was on the dresser. “And besides, the story’s not true, most of it’s bullshit. Maybe Pearl got everything right, but you sure as shit didn’t.”

Zito’s throat felt thick and dry, and he rasped, “What do you mean?”

Mulder punched his finger at the story, reading, “‘Despite Mulder’s protestations, Zito remains convinced of the other man’s feelings for him, “He’s totally, out-of-his-head, stupid in love with me.”’” Mulder raised his fierce eyes to Zito. “You really think that’s how it was?”

The pain in Zito’s chest was this huge thing, this immense pressure that crushed the air out of his lungs and flattened his heart, and he would have given anything in the world not to hear Mulder deny the quote, but he couldn’t stop it, he was helpless, hopeless.

At Zito’s shaky nod, Mulder flung the paper at him, the fluttering gray pages exploding against his body. “Don’t fucking flatter yourself,” and Zito closed his eyes, unable to believe that he could feel pain like this. “You were there. You were fucking easy. You think I’d risk everything I’ve earned for you? You think you and I were gonna be some kind of queer pioneers in major league ball, and that eventually we could retire and move to the Castro or something? Fucking deluded.”

Zito collapsed back against the wall, trying to breathe steady and even, trying to hold himself together. “Please . . . please don’t say that. Please don’t do this.” He was aware that his voice was edging very close to pleading, but he didn’t care. Couldn’t care.

“You did it, man. It’s done.”

Zito raised his eyes, taking in the whole long sweep of Mulder’s form, and there was no part of him that could conceive of never getting to touch Mulder again, never getting to feel the give and take of his body, never getting to see Mulder smile at him like Zito was something beautiful and good enough. “We . . . we’ve got to go through this together. It’s gonna be so awful, I know, and I’m so sorry, please, you gotta believe me, man, I’m so sorry, but we can’t do this alone. _I_ can’t do this alone. If . . . if I can’t be sure of you, if I can’t feel you there beside me, I don’t . . . I, I can’t . . .” He trailed off, his voice cracking and choked in his throat.

Mulder’s eyes, the dark changeling eyes that Zito had loved to watch shift and twist colors in the heartbreaking motion of the night, were flat, emotionless, like he was looking at nothing that had ever mattered, nothing that had ever touched him, or made him laugh, or caused his breath to come short and gasped with joy. “I’m done going through things with you. I’ll be going through enough hell because of you, why would I want to be your fucking pillar of strength too?”

‘Because you are,’ Zito wanted to say, but he knew it wasn’t true anymore. Instead, he said raggedly, “But we’re gonna be there together whether you want to or not. Tomorrow, with Beane, and for all the rest of it, they’re gonna go after the two of us, so we gotta stand . . . stand up. As one.”

His face all contorted and mean, Mulder shook his head, biting off his words short and bitter. “Maybe you’re gonna stand up, but you’re gonna do it without me. You wanna know what I’m gonna say to Beane tomorrow? And to any reporter who asks me to comment?”

Zito desperately did not want to know, but he couldn’t seem to make himself make a sound or move to stop the other man’s words.

“I’m gonna tell them it’s a fucking lie. Every word of it.”

Zito lost his breath, barely able to whisper, “What?”

Mulder nodded, fire and all hell in his glaring face. “I’m gonna tell them you’ve got some perverted crush on me, that you made a pass at me awhile ago and I told you no fucking way, and this is your way of getting back at me.”

“You can’t. You . . . you won’t, you can’t,” Zito stuttered.

“The hell I can’t. You thought it was gonna be tough being one of only two ballplayers in the game who were openly sleeping with a teammate, wait ‘til you have to do it on your own.”

Zito was shaking his head, and he didn’t realize he was speaking out loud until he heard the faint echo of his words calling back to him off the window glass. “No. No, no, no.”

Mulder just glowered at him, his hands on his hips, all his muscles pulled tight, and there was soft triangle of skin where his shirt collar was thumbed open, the dip at the base of his throat, where a pulse beat quiet and steady, something that Zito had once felt on his tongue, resting his fingers there and keeping time by the even rhythm of Mulder’s heart.

“Don’t do this to me,” he said, his voice faltering, shredding along the edges of the words. “Mulder, I don’t . . . I don’t know if I can . . . I don’t think I’ll be okay if you do this to me. I can’t, I can’t imagine never getting to wake up with you again, I can’t imagine losing you.” He took a breath, trying to steady himself, trying to be stronger than he was, and he was trembling as he said, “I love you, man. I . . . I love you.”

“Yeah, well, a lot of fucking good that’s done me.”

Somewhere in Zito’s mind, Mulder was laughing. Somewhere in Zito’s mind Mulder was happy, and hanging on to him in the night, and closing his hands in Zito’s hair, and counting Zito’s ribs one by one, climbing his fingers up the ladder of Zito’s bones. Somewhere in Zito’s mind, everything was okay, and Mulder was making him believe that Zito was all he needed.

Here, though, in this airless hotel room, Mulder was moving towards the door, and Zito could only ask helplessly, “Where are you going?”

And Mulder turned just before he reached his hand for the knob, saying coldly, “I don’t want to look at you anymore. I can’t stand the sight of you. I’ve never wanted to hit anyone as badly as I want to hit you right now, so you better let me go.”

Let him go? Let him go? How do you let someone out of your heart?

Zito breathed out the other man’s name, and Mulder put his hand up on the wall, his fingers spread out, bracing him, and he wasn’t looking at Zito when he said, “The story, in the paper . . . it said I was everything you were ever sure of. Is that what you told him?”

Zito nodded, all the words he had ever known vanished from his mind, and though Mulder didn’t look up, he seemed to have seen the affirmation, continuing, “Well, I’ve never been sure of much, but I was sure that you’d never do this to me. I was sure you’d never destroy everything I’ve ever cared about, even if it was an idiotic drunken mistake. I was trusting you with something that I didn’t even trust myself with, not really. My . . . my whole life . . .”

Mulder sighed, a deep, aching exhalation, and he tilted forward slowly, resting his forehead briefly against the doorjamb, his eyes closed and his wild, destructive anger sinking away into something low and infinite, something that sounded like despair. “I was sure of that. And now I can never be sure of you again.”

Then Mulder raised his head and pulled the door open and left, without another word, without a single backward glance, and Zito felt the chill creep of numbness stealing over his body, and he fell back against the wall, sliding down until his folded legs were up against his chest, his forehead pressed to his knees, and he was trying to hold himself together, trying to hold on to the empty nothingness of his body, his heart, his soul, trying to stay numb for as long as possible, because he knew that in a few seconds, this was going to hurt like hell.


	3. No Sign of Land, or How to Stand Up

Part Three: No Sign of Land, or How to Stand Up  
By Candle Beck

 

Driving across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco to Oakland, early in the morning, white-collar commuter time, the sky was faded blue, paled by the white light of the sun, washed out, and it made Zito feel weak, like the fact that this vast thing couldn’t even hold on to color made his own corrupted form that much more useless.

Zito was looking for Alcatraz out in the bay, trying to catch sight of Coit Tower, straight as a matchstick and albino white atop brambly Telegraph Hill looking like a kid with his hair uncombed and sleep-wild, Zito was listening to the echoing thrum of cars heading into the tunnel through Treasure Island, and counting the number of BMWs that passed him by. Zito was trying very hard not to think of what was awaiting him when he got to the ballpark, trying with all his strength not to replay in his head the events of the previous night.

It was no good, though, it was a hopeless endeavor. Mulder’s words circled, stalked, terrorized his mind, refusing to give him a moment of peace. Zito would be thinking of seagulls, or the wild card race, or how much he wished he could be surfing, and then out of nowhere, like a thin beam of light, he would hear Mulder’s voice in his head:

‘Fuck you and your fucking excuses.’

‘ _This_ is what people remember, this is the stuff that sticks.’

‘Fucking faggots.’

‘You were fucking easy.’

‘I’m gonna tell them it’s a fucking lie.’

‘I can’t stand the sight of you.’

‘And now I can never be sure of you again.’

These aren’t things you get over easy.

Zito was on his way to the Coliseum, for the first-thing-in-the-morning meeting that Billy Beane had ordered him to the day before. Zito was on his way to the room in which the rest of his life would be decided, where he would tell the truth and the man he was still desperately, miserably in love would deny every word of it.

Fucking reporters.

Pearl’s story was everywhere now, every newsstand, every television set, every radio call-in program. Zito could see people recognizing him from other cars, could see the flash double-take as the driver’s head flicked around to stare, could see the pointing fingers, the glassed-in mouths behind the windows forming the buzzing shape of his name, the brief stretch of teeth saying the word ‘gay’, the flattening press of lips as they added Mulder’s name. Sometimes someone would knock on their window, waving to him frantically, their hands blurred with speed. Sometimes they shot him a thumbs-up, other times a stiff upraised middle finger, but most often they just laughed, looking like dumb bug-eyed fish in an aquarium, and after awhile he stopped looking at anything except the bumper of the car in front of him, tunnel vision closing him in, determinedly ignoring the cacophony around him.

Zito was disastrously, unbelievably tired, having been unable to get to sleep the night before. Even just lying in bed, pressing his hands to the mattress, assuring himself that he was resting motionless and safe, he was unable to shake the feeling of falling, the roiling wave of nausea, the terror of plummeting downward with no hope of catching hold of anything, no chance for any sort of miracle to snatch him up and place him on solid ground again.

After Mulder had left him alone, Zito had been wrecked, sitting folded up against himself for the better part of an hour, his eyes staring blind, scratchy and dry because he forgot to blink. All the rest of his life stretched out in front of him, days and weeks and months and years surrounding him like an ocean, and he was lost at sea, he was adrift, he was miles away from anywhere with no anchor, no harbor, abandoned on the hard steel-gray water with no sign of land.

Thinking about it was a good way to drive himself crazy. Thinking about it made him want to put a gun to his head.

He was taking things minute by minute, getting through the small tasks, telling himself that if he got through this next hour, this next day, this next week, soon enough his broken heart would be far behind him, and he would be able to breathe again.

It wasn’t really working, though, not when every few seconds he was seeing Mulder’s face superimposed on the backs of his eyelids, and sometimes Mulder was smiling warmly at him, and sometimes Mulder was glaring murderously as he had been the night before, and Zito wasn’t really sure which was worse.

Pulling into the players’ parking lot, Zito saw the mess of reporters crowding around the clubhouse door, the twitching vibration of awareness as they spotted him, their notched-up excitement, the rustle as they prepared their notebooks and cameras, and he wondered if he would ever again be able to go anywhere where that sight didn’t greet him.

“Zito! Zito! Barry! How long’s it been going on? What’d the team say? Did Mulder know about the story before it came out? Zito! Are you guys gonna stay in baseball? Is it true that Mulder lost his start last week because of you? Barry! Hey, Barry, over here! Come on, Zito, tell us your side!”

Which was a little ridiculous, seeing as how he had already obviously told his side, his side was plastered all over every sports page in the country.

The assault of the reporters was fierce, but mercifully brief. Zito kept his eyes down, watching his feet pace quickly across the concrete, and soon enough he was in the clubhouse, the door clicking shut behind him and deafening the frenzied yells.

Exhaling a deep sigh of relief to be in the safe confines of a ballpark again, Zito was immediately reminded by his treacherous brain that the reporters weren’t the worst of it, not by a long shot.

In a few minutes, he would have to face Mulder again.

And that really didn’t seem like something he was physically capable of doing, not at the moment. Maybe not ever.

‘Be kinda hard to make it to the playoffs if two of the starting pitchers refuse to have any contact with each other,’ Zito admonished himself, before realizing that the playoffs were the last of his concern, his primary worry was whether he would even have a job in the next hour or two.

The A’s, along with most every other team in organized ball, had a morals clause in the players’ contract, and while Zito had never heard of it being enforced in a case such as this, it wasn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility that a personal relationship between two players that jeopardized their quality of play could be cast in such a light. Certainly, that was the opinion of many of the radio show callers and sports editors, not so much across the bridge in the rainbow-striped tolerance of San Francisco, but here in the East Bay, tough and proud and working class, the idea that the star pitchers of their beloved franchise were engaged in something more than friendship was hitting pretty hard.

“They’re perverts and I don’t want to bring my kids to watch them play,” had been one erudite opinion that had managed to slip through Zito’s defenses that morning before he barricaded himself in the haven of his car, and he feared that the club’s organization would follow much the same train of thought.

Zito tried to pull himself together, imagining his spine as a rod of steel, his face a stone mask, his heart cold and stagnant. Walking down the concrete tunnel, his footsteps echoing, sounding like someone was chasing after him, Zito tried to empty his mind and be impassive, unaffected, protecting himself from the possibility that Beane or, worse, Mulder, would see how far down his destruction reached.

The last thing that whipped through his torrential mind before he stalled his thoughts completely was a quick prayer that he wouldn’t burst into tears in front of them.

*

The first thing Mulder thought when he saw Zito walk into the GM’s office was how young he looked.

‘Jesus, he’s just a kid,’ Mulder’s mind flashed before he clamped down impatiently on the tug of compassion. He reminded himself of the obscene, anonymous messages left on his answering machine, the way his housemates the night before had all retreated into their bedrooms the second they got home from the game, the snick as they locked their doors behind them. He reminded himself of the humiliation, the stunned mortification at seeing the most private moments of his life recapped in a newspaper, he kept on a loop in his head all the times he’d heard ballplayers say that they would never play with a gay teammate, they would never want to be in the same locker room, or on the same field, as ‘one of those’. He reminded himself that all of this was Zito’s fault, and he let the swift wash of his anger flood through him again, urging it to bring him confidence and strength.

This was Zito’s fault.

And the fact that Zito looked unspeakably, impossibly young, looked like someone who should be shielded from all ugliness and pain, that changed nothing.

Mulder glared at Zito, saw something flicker in Zito’s eyes before the other man pulled his gaze away, the up-down duck of his throat as he swallowed hard.

Mulder balled up his hands and shoved them in the pockets of his coat, scowling and trying to banish the odd throb of sadness that beat within him.

Neither Mulder nor Zito looked at each other, both of them staring at Beane’s empty chair, waiting for the GM to show up. Mulder could feel the heat pulsing out of Zito like a force field, and he remembered suddenly, with perfect clarity, that Zito’s shirt collar hid a mark on the man’s shoulder, a small darkly shadowed interruption on the smooth skin, a memory of the pressure of Mulder’s mouth, a souvenir from, what, only two days before, the last time he wanted to taste Zito so badly he ended up leaving a bruise behind.

Why the fuck are you thinking about that now?

Mulder shook his head, grimacing at the unwanted thought of Zito’s skin, Zito’s body, the way they had been only two days ago, the span of which now felt like an ice age.

Mulder had to say something then, had to fill the air with words so he could chase away his traitorous thoughts, which whispered to him about the feel of Zito’s hips under his palms, the high splintered glass cries that got ripped from both their throats at the same moment, the pull of his fingers through Zito’s sweat-soaked hair, and how Zito smiled against his mouth.

“Have you decided to stop being a goddamned idiot and tell them the story’s bullshit?”

Zito’s head jerked, quick enough to look painful, and his wide, pleading eyes met Mulder’s, who almost took a step backwards at the anguish that poured out of the other man’s face.

Zito only looked at him for a moment, but it was long enough for Mulder to see the blackness in his eyes, the petrifying glint of something devastated, something that was broken beyond any point of repair.

The sounds of an instinctive apology were halfway up Mulder’s throat, and he had almost begun to respond to the automatic pull of his muscles to go to Zito, put his arms around the other man, do whatever needed to be done to make this better, before Mulder remembered himself and slammed his regret back down, bitterly reproaching this weakness of his, this inability to hang onto his rage.

Zito half-coughed weakly, and rubbed his hand over the back of his neck, replying woodenly, his voice hollow, “I’m gonna tell them the truth.”

Now the anger came back, and Mulder welcomed it. “You’re gonna screw me over again? I’m sorry, you didn’t do a good enough job the last time?”

He expected that to spark a rise in Zito, expected the other man to respond sharply, anger matching anger, and Mulder waited for it eagerly, wanting the snap back-and-forth of a blood-fueled argument, looking forward to the opportunity to take on Zito, because even fighting with Zito had always been more fun than just about everything else.

But Zito was blank, all monotone and muscles held resolutely still, like he was keeping himself upright through sheer force of will. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. And if this is going to make it worse for you, then I’m sorry. But I can’t tell them it’s not true. It was . . . it was the truest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

He looked like he was going to say something more, but then his mouth closed and stayed that way, his eyes staring unseeing at the autographed picture of Dennis Eckersley on the wall behind Beane’s desk.

Mulder scratched at the fabric of the inside of his pockets, feeling frustrated and unruly, wanting to tear away at Zito’s carefully constructed façade, wanting to force some emotion out of the other man. “Fuck, Zito, do you realize how easily we could get past this? You tell them the reporter made up every word of the story, you tell them it’s total bullshit, and I back you, then that’s it, man. It’s over, and we can go home.”

Zito smiled without mirth, the expression like a ghost on his face, somehow making him look more annihilated than ever before. “I don’t got a whole lot to go home to, anymore.”

Mulder felt a deep, clawing headache begin to sink into his brain, and he shot back savagely, “Well, that’s your own fucking fault, isn’t it?”

Zito raised a hand to his head, and Mulder wondered if he had a headache too. He wondered if Zito had slept that night, or if he had been wretchedly awake all through the dawn, same as Mulder. There were tender bad-sleep bruises under Zito’s eyes, and he looked so terribly tired.

Zito placed his hand up against his eyes, and made a noise that was halfway between a sigh and a moan, and he said, his voice flagging like a dying flame, “Listen, could you just . . . could you not yell at me anymore today? I know you got a right, and I promise, you come by sometime over the weekend, I’ll stand there and let you say whatever you want, I’ll let you beat the crap out of me if you want, but . . . not today, okay, man? I really didn’t think I could feel any worse than I did last night, but now I think if you yell at me anymore . . . I don’t think I’ll be able to take it.”

Christ, why’d he have to go and say something like that?

All at once, all of Mulder’s good cleansing anger was gone, replaced by nothing but guilt, and the sick stupid knowledge that he was kicking a man while he was down, and suddenly Mulder was disgusted with himself, and this cruel heartless thing that he’d become.

“Hey, look, man—” he began, trying to soften the words so they wouldn’t accidentally hit anything in Zito that he had already broken.

Zito cut him off, his voice going stark again, free of any inflection, the robot voice that answers calls at banks. “Maybe you’re right anyway. What’s the point of standing up for something that’s over? If I can’t have you, then maybe I shouldn’t want the memory of you, either. Maybe it’s better to just get rid of everything, the future and the past.”

Mulder couldn’t tell if that was Zito convincing himself, trying to force his mind to accept something that would never be true. Mulder couldn’t even tell if he himself was convinced that what Zito had said was true.

Mulder was about to say something, something that maybe wouldn’t fix this, but surely would make it a little better, even just a little better, but then Billy Beane was striding into the office, the door clapping a single round of applause as it slammed back against the wall, and Mulder shut his mouth quickly, turning to face front, feeling like he should be standing at attention, his body military-strict.

“All right, I want to know what the hell is going on here, and I want the truth, and believe me, boys, you try to lie, I’m gonna see it, and I’m gonna have your asses,” Beane laid out without preamble, sitting behind his desk and leveling a hard gaze at the two pitchers.

Mulder snuck a glance over at Zito, and if he hadn’t known the other man as well as he did, he would have thought that Zito was perfectly calm, unperturbed and ready to clear the air. Because Mulder _did_ know Zito as well as he did, however, he could see the tic of Zito’s mouth, the quick flutter of his eyelids over the sparkle of his too-bright eyes, the wiry muscle tensing in his jaw, and he knew that Zito was trembling on the edge of collapse, the world closing in around him, he knew that Zito couldn’t breathe, his vision going blurry, his mouth dry, same as what happened when the ballgame had suddenly gotten out of control, his pitches refusing to find the plate, or finding too much of the plate, the slow-motion of everything slipping away from him, and then Mulder wondered which of the two of them he was describing, Zito or himself.

“Well?” Beane demanded, his eyebrows going up. Mulder opened his mouth, having absolutely no idea what he was going to say, but Zito beat him to it, the other man’s voice coming out smooth and easy, entirely believable to everybody in the world except Mulder, who knew Zito better than anyone else in the world.

“It was a joke, sir,” Zito answered, his head up, his back straight.

Beane leaned forward over his desk, planting his elbows on the coming month’s travel schedule. “Excuse me?”

Zito shrugged bashfully, just the right amount of self-chastisement in his pose. “Pearl came up to me in the bar, he was a kid reporter, I was having some fun with him. I could tell he thought I was drunker than I was, and he was trying to get a story while my defenses were down, so I . . . I gave him a good one. I never thought he’d run with it. Especially not without calling back to confirm it with me.”

Beane rolled his eyes. “Well, when you think a drunk man is telling you secrets he would never admit to soberly, you don’t tend to remind him of it in the morning.”

Zito nodded, a half-smile on his face, “No, sir.” Mulder noticed that Zito’s hands were shaking, and wondered how much this little charade was costing him.

Beane switched his focus, pinning Mulder with his gaze. “What about you, Mulder?”

Before Mulder could say a word, Zito said quickly, “Mulder didn’t know anything about it. I told him the next day, and he thought it was pretty funny, but he didn’t think Pearl would write it, either.” Zito slid a quiet, aching look his way, saying low, “Right, man?”

Fumbling into his cue, Mulder nodded stupidly, stammering, “Uh . . . yeah. Yeah. I . . . you know, I thought Pearl would see right through it.” He began to grow into the story, finding his footing in the other man’s lie. “I mean, I’ve played poker with Zito, he can’t bluff to save his life.”

Mulder tried to shoot Zito a grin, both to nudge Beane further along the path of believing them, and to honestly thank Zito for doing this, but Zito wouldn’t meet his gaze, and his whole face was shuttered, like there was something horrible happening behind his eyes.

Beane huffed an exasperated breath, tipping back in his chair, saying to Zito, “Well, you played Pearl pretty well. Well enough for him to convince his editor to publish it without a hint to me or anyone else in the organization.”

Zito nodded, his shoulders curving inward apologetically. “Yes, sir, and I’m sorry about that. About everything. I just . . . I never thought anyone would take it seriously. I thought it was way too ridiculous for anyone to believe.”

‘Zito is an amazing actor,’ Mulder thought pointlessly.

Beane slanted Zito an askance look of disbelief. “You live in San Francisco and collect stuffed animals, Barry.”

Zito affected the most perfect playing-dumb expression Mulder had ever seen, dead-panning, “What’s your point?”

At that, Beane burst into laughter, the broad relieved laughter of a man who’s just dodged a bullet and had his worldview righted in the same moment. Mulder grinned along goofily, until he sketched a look over in Zito’s direction and saw that, despite his beam of a grin, the other man’s eyes were somewhere epically far away, lost in some unfathomable sadness.

Beane sighed contentedly, the universe making sense again, and said, “All right, boys, here’s what we’re gonna do. Right after the game tonight, we’re gonna hold a press conference, and you’re gonna tell them just what you told me. Anyone who doesn’t believe you, and trust me, there’s gonna be a few who don’t, you don’t need to go out of your way to convince them, just take their questions, don’t get angry. It’ll take a while for this to die down, and I don’t want either of you getting caught up in a pissing contest with some reporter who won’t let it drop. That’ll just make it worse.”

As one, Mulder and Zito replied, “Yes, sir.”

Beane stood behind his desk, giving Zito a look of exaggerated request, “And, Barry, it would really help me out a lot if you didn’t play any more ‘jokes’ on the sports reporters. You think perhaps you can restrain yourself?”

Zito nodded obediently, still working the puppy-dog eyes for all they were worth, looking like a kid who’d just cracked a baseball through his neighbor’s window, the good-hearted boy nobody could stay mad at.

“Okay. You guys can head home, I’ll see you tonight.”

With that, Beane left, leaving Zito and Mulder standing alone in his office, Mulder looking at Zito, Zito looking at nothing.

“Thanks, man,” Mulder said, genuinely grateful, already well on his way to imagining that things were fixed, they could go about the business of being friends again.

“Yeah,” Zito replied tonelessly, the word dropping like a stone.

Mulder raised an eyebrow. “You all right?”

Zito gave him an incredulous look, his voice darting with pain as he said, “No, Mulder, I’m not ‘all right’.”

 

Zito moved for the door, but Mulder caught his arm, wrapping his hand around the other man’s elbow, feeling the shift of the bone and the strong moving line of the muscle. “Hey—” Mulder began, feeling irrationally upset that Zito was ruining his vision of a repaired life.

Zito snatched his arm away from Mulder, blinking fast, his throat bobbing compulsively. “You’re gonna . . . you’re gonna have to give me a little time, okay. You’re gonna have to maybe not touch me for a little while. Maybe not talk to me so much, either. I don’t know for how long, but . . . I can’t handle being around you right now.”

They were standing in the same room and Zito was somehow a world away from Mulder. Something hard with the dull copper taste of pennies or blood pressed up against Mulder’s throat, something that tasted like panic, the scratching sense in the back of his head that maybe this wasn’t going to get better, maybe they’d gone too far to ever get back home.

He tried to ridicule the idea, tried to make himself believe that anything that can be broken, can be fixed. Mulder scoffed, unease shivering along the corners of his words, “Don’t be so melodramatic, man. This isn’t some big tragedy, we knew it’d have to end sometime. So now we can go back to being friends. What’s so terrible about that?”

All at once, Zito broke down, his body shaking hard for a moment before he fell into the chair behind him, covering up his face with his hands. He spoke from behind his fingers, his words muffled and thick, jagged with barely-restrained tears, “Fuck, Mulder, do you still not get it? This wasn’t some little flight of fancy for me, this isn’t something I can just forget about and move on. I’m . . . oh, I’m real glad to hear that you’re ready to be friends with me again, but I really don’t think that’s gonna work.”

Zito pulled his hands away and looked up at Mulder, who was stock-still and silent. Zito’s eyes gleamed, and Mulder felt something wrench violently in his chest. “I wish I could tell you this isn’t going to be a problem for me, I wish I could tell you that I knew it had to end sometime, too, but I can’t, Mulder. I’ve never felt about anybody the way I feel about you, and it’s not just gonna go away. I can’t just make it stop. Falling in love with you was the easiest thing I’ve ever done, but I don’t know how to fall out of love with you, I don’t have the slightest fucking clue how to do that.”

Zito dragged a wracked sigh out of his body, and said slowly, “I just turned the best thing that’s ever happened to me into a lie. So maybe you can cut me some slack, now.”

Mulder didn’t know what to say, didn’t have any idea how to answer something like that. He felt scarred, frayed and cold like there was a windstorm happening inside of him. “Why’d you do it then?” he asked hoarsely. “Why’d you make all that up just now? If . . . if what we were was some perfect thing to you, the truest thing, why’d you deny it?”

Zito half-laughed, the rough sound of it endlessly forlorn, and answered, “Well, why the fuck not? If I can’t save myself, at least I can make it easier for you. My own life is fucked, I can’t do anything about that now, but I can do this for you. That’s what you do when you love someone.”

‘I never deserved someone like him, anyway,’ Mulder’s mind suddenly told him, and he was shocked, appalled by the thought, immediately smothering the words, telling himself, ‘I don’t _want_ anyone like him, so what the fuck does it matter whether I deserved it or not?’

Zito, crumpled in the chair, his long legs scattered across the carpet, his strong hands hanging onto the disintegrating parts of his body, looked away out the window, out towards the sweet bright green of the field, the ashy gray of the concrete stadium, the football seats way up in the atmosphere, and Mulder remembered Zito telling him, sometime in the sun-drenched past, that Zito had always believed that as long as he could see a baseball field, things couldn’t get too bad.

“You wanna hear something funny?” he asked absently, miles away.

Mulder didn’t answer, scared to death at what Zito might say, his eyes locked on the other man’s face, that face he knew better than his own.

Zito continued despite the lack of response, “That night, in the bar, with Pearl . . . I said all that stuff, I said it because . . . because I was happy.” He smiled sadly, still staring out at the park. “I’d finally told you I love you, and it didn’t particularly matter that you hadn’t said it back to me. I was just so happy to have said it and known it was really true, not just something I felt like I should say, or something I had to say because someone else had said it first.”

Zito rubbed at his shoulder, tugged on his ear, something Mulder knew he did when he was deep in his memory. Mulder was intensely, overwhelmingly aware of Zito, watching his every movement with desperate attention, like he was trying to memorize the other man in case he never got to see him again

His voice wandering and detached, Zito said, “I think maybe I could have been stone-cold sober and I still would have told Pearl the exact same thing. We had come all that way just the two of us, just you and me, hiding it from everybody, and I just . . . I wanted to say it out loud to someone else. Because what if the team plane crashed and we both died, then nobody would ever know . . . it would be like it had never happened. I wanted to make it real, and I didn’t . . . I didn’t care what would happen.”

Zito’s eyes worked over the walls of Beane’s office, tracking across the bookshelf and the photos and the miscellany, an old beat-up glove, a baseball with a dark smudge where it had been struck dead-on-the-button by a bat, a green and gold coffee cup with Stomper, the A’s elephant mascot, grinning out at them.

Zito sighed, the air rushing from him. “And now it’s all gone to hell, and it’s all my fault, and I still can’t be sorry.”

He shifted, his eyes coming around to meet Mulder’s, and the clash of their gazes was like a spark, something electric, a buzz that Mulder could feel in his tingling skin. Zito said clearly, “I’m not sorry for falling in love with you, and I’m not sorry for trying to share it with someone else. All I’m sorry for is lying about it just now. Because I never thought I’d do that.”

Zito’s voice cracked, but he didn’t stop, the words coming out dented and broken, “And I’m sorry I wasn’t enough for you. I’m sorry I thought you felt something you didn’t, and I’m sorry all this has happened to you because of me. But the thing is . . . if I had to do it all over again, I’d do everything the exact same. ‘Cause you were worth it, to me. You were worth anything.”

Zito wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand, and Mulder hadn’t realized that the other man had been crying. Mulder raised his own hand and was surprised to find the tips of his fingers shimmering with wetness when he took them away, and suddenly the world was underwater, suddenly everything was swimming around him.

Zito stood up, ducking his head down, saying desolately, “I gotta go. I’ll . . . I’ll see you later, I guess.”

He moved to the door, and Mulder could see the muscles in his back and shoulders trembling, struggling to remain calm. Just before he walked out, Zito turned, facing the other man one last time, and Mulder was ruined by the riots in Zito’s eyes.

“Good-bye, Mulder,” Zito said softly, and Mulder knew he had never known anyone as good as this man, and he knew that he wouldn’t go after Zito, no matter how much he wanted to.

The door closed behind him with a slow, certain click, and Mulder whispered into the hopeless empty air, “Good-bye, Zito.”


	4. Things that Didn't Get Said Out Loud, or How to Realize Your Mistake

Part Four: Things That Didn’t Get Said Out Loud, or How To Realize Your Mistake  
By Candle Beck

 

I miss you.

I miss the way your hands move when you play the guitar.

I miss the look on your face right before you tell us the punch-line of some dumb joke.

I miss how you write little mottos on the underside of your cap brim and mutter insults at the batters that you would never in a million years say off the mound.

I miss hearing about what your sisters are doing.

I miss talking to your mother on the phone and promising her that I’ll look out for you.

I miss looking out for you.

I miss how you look after a game, the way the brown infield dirt somehow migrates into your soft hair, tracks of sweat mapping roads through the dust shadowing your forehead and neck, the sunlight caught up in the creases of your face when you laugh, the smeared grass stains on your knees and the palms of your hands, the tips of your fingers rough and imprinted by the stitches of the ball, your body painted with bruises that you don’t feel, and as soon as the last out is recorded, the second the game ends, all you’re doing is waiting for the next time we get to play.

I miss how you sing along with the bad Muzak they play in supermarkets.

I miss the way you say my name in your sleep.

I miss that crooked thing that happens to your mouth when you’re staring out airplane windows, that far far away gaze of yours like you see something in the clouds and the laid-out curve of the earth that is hidden from everybody else.

I miss being proud of your curveball like it was my own.

I miss on the morning of the fifth day, my turn in the rotation, when we’re lying around in bed for a couple of hours before we get up and you make waffles or I make Cap’n Crunch, and you sling an arm over my stomach and prop your chin up on my chest, your hair falling down into your eyes, and you catch my sleepy gaze with your own, and tell me with total certainty, “You’re gonna pitch a perfect game today,” and I always roll my eyes and try to shove you off, but you won’t let me go, and I know you believe it, every time you say it, and on the night of the fifth day, after I haven’t pitched a perfect game, you whisper into the dark as we fall asleep, “You’ll pitch a perfect game next week,” and you believe that too, each and every time you say it.

I miss your goddamned stuffed animals and how you sprawl out over the whole bed, how your arms and legs get tossed over me and make up for the covers that you stole.

I miss staying up until two in the morning so you can watch Tom and Jerry before we go to sleep.

I miss how you never set your watch ahead when we go on road trips, always taking that extra blink of a second to add an hour or two or three whenever anyone asks you the time, and though the guys say it’s ‘cause you’re lazy, I get the feeling that you just like to have that one part of yourself still back in California, that single piece of your mind staying grounded to the Pacific Ocean, your heart remaining in the place where, once they found it, two centuries worth of pioneers stopped looking for anything else.

I miss the look on your face every time you come out of the ballpark tunnel and see the field all thrown open to you, and every single time you look about six years old, seeing a big league stadium for the first time.

I miss your never-ending stories and how you stutter when you’re drunk, or happy.

I miss the lines of your arms, the curve of your back, the knobby track of your spine, the shadowy indent of your collarbone, the clean fresh taste of your skin, the warm smooth plane of your chest, the careful sweet run of your jaw, the wide spread of your fingers, the places on your body that only I know about.

I miss the way the sun glints off your wet hair the same way it glints off the ocean, when you’re out there surfing at dawn and I’m standing on the shore, freezing cold and fall-down tired, the exhaustion making everything blurry and soft, watching you all alone out there in the middle of all that unreal silver and gold and blue, Santa Cruz at five o’clock in the morning when the sea is like glass.

I miss hearing you call reporters and coaches and Hall-of-Famers ‘dude’.

I miss your voice, all even and clean like California, no accent except what you picked up from the hippies and the stoners and the kids from the Valley who taught you how to surf.

I miss your insane fashion sense, the fact that you own orange paisley pants, the way you can throw on a shirt and a coat that would be some god-awful eyesore on anyone else, some tragic turn-your-eyes-away clash of patterns and colors, but on you it just looks right, clothes that make strangers grin at you on the street and holler “Lookin’ good, my man!” out of car windows.

I miss how you used to smile when you saw me.

I miss reaching out in the dark and finding you, feeling you turn towards me and pull me closer in your sleep, ‘cause you always seemed to know that that was all I needed to be safe. To be home.

I miss going to that bar on the Mission and playing pool with you and Hudson and Chavvy, and Huddy always stretches out his drawl real deep and low, bragging about how much of our money he’s gonna win, and Chavvy talks about Minnesota Fats and Paul Newman and spends half the night hitting on girls, and you just kinda smile all secretive and very quietly wipe the floor with all three of us, I bet you’ve won most of Huddy’s signing bonus at this point, and no one can ever see you coming, with your innocent blinking eyes and hustler’s heart.

I miss all the things I didn’t pay enough attention to, the things I thought I would have time to notice later, like the hollow wooden creak of your feet coming across my front porch, and how you like your eggs in the morning, and which of all your rabbits’ feet is the luckiest one, and the precise reverberation of that epic bear-yawn of yours when you slowly begin to drag yourself out of bed, stretching your arms all the way out and knocking the alarm clock off the bedside table, and the name of that store in the Haight where you bought the aviator sunglasses that make you look like a traffic cop or a rock star, and the exact location of that twisting scar on your arm that you claim you got in a knife fight, though your sister Sally told me it was just from diving too deep into the ocean, slicing open your skin on the slick green-black rocks.

I miss believing that I was a good man, a belief that got knocked out of me the second I left you alone in that hotel room, left you bent against the wall, looking demolished, and I knew it was my fault, I knew I had destroyed something pure, and I saw it the next day, in Beane’s office, when you told me you were only sorry that you hadn’t been enough for me, and I’m not a good man, I’ve never been a good man, I’ve ripped apart the one truly good thing that’s ever happened to me, I’m not a good man, you’re the good man, and I made you deny something that we should have been shouting from the rooftops together, something that I should have been the first to claim as my own, something that made me better than I’ve ever been.

I miss knowing something as well as I used to know you.

I miss seeing the game through your eyes, your good clear eyes, the honest joy you take in the world.

I miss your strength, the strength I never gave you enough credit for, the way you were always braver than me, brave enough to say out loud the words I couldn’t even admit to myself, strong enough to let me break your heart and then stand up in front of the whole world and save my life, even though I’m beginning to think that the life you saved, the life without you in it, isn’t one much worth living.

I miss looking for you whenever I want to see something beautiful.

I miss feeling right.

I miss you. I want you back.

my god. my god. what have i done?


	5. The Long Way Home, or How to Make It Right Again

Part Five: The Long Way Home, or How to Make It Right Again  
By Candle Beck

 

Mulder didn’t know what he was doing there.

Five minutes before midnight and he was standing outside Anthony Pearl’s apartment, staring at the little metal plate that read 5G, positioned just above the door’s peephole. It was a simple, unremarkable wooden door, that dull Indian clay gray-brown color of a million other apartment doors in the city. Nothing particularly fascinating about it, nothing that made it stick out.

And yet Mulder had been standing in front of it for going on ten minutes, his gaze fixed intently, like he was trying to bore a hole in the wood with his eyes.

Fuck, knock already!

Before he could talk himself out of it, Mulder raised his hand and rapped his knuckles twice, wincing as he did so, already regretting it.

He heard the muffled sounds of movement from within the apartment, the scrape of a chair being pushed back, the padded thumps of feet approaching on carpet, and for a split second Mulder almost ran away, his whole body taut with the urge to flee, but then there were the shadows of two legs under the door, and he could hear the startled sound of Pearl recognizing him through the peephole, the other man’s voice saying, “Jesus Christ,” then the quiet curse as Pearl realized that he’d given away his position, he had no chance to sneak back away from the door and pretend not to be home.

There was a long, tense moment, Mulder standing out in the hallway with his hands bracketing his hips, staring directly back at the tiny piece of warped glass. The shadows of Pearl’s legs didn’t move from beneath the door, but neither did the door open.

Mulder got impatient, saying loudly, “Let me in, Pearl.”

The shadows twitched, like Pearl had jumped, and then the reporter’s voice came through the door clearly, “No way.”

Mulder hiked his eyebrows up, feeling frustration start to gather like black storm clouds around him. “Pearl—” he began, his voice going low and menacing, near to a growl, leaning forward towards the door.

Pearl made a choked laughing sound, cutting him off. “No, are you . . . are you kidding me? No way!”

Placing his hand up on the door, pressing his palm and fingers flat against the wood, Mulder wished that he could see through the peephole. It wasn’t fair that one side got to see the other while one of them was locked out, he thought, irritated, his temper gone past short to basically nonexistent.

“I’m not gonna hurt you, man,” he claimed, though he wasn’t entirely sure if that was true or not. When you end up at certain places in the middle of the night without knowing why, you can’t really rule out anything that might happen.

Mulder could almost see Pearl balancing on the balls of his feet, his hands braced against the doorjamb, peering through the glass, all his attention zeroed down to that little hole-punch of a view. “You’re going to hit me, your fist is going to make contact with my head at a high velocity, how exactly is that not going to hurt me?”

Mulder rolled his eyes, feeling something thick and red press up against his brain, and he replied, meaner than he intended, “I’m not gonna hit you, Pearl, for Christ’s sake! Let me in!”

There was a moment of consideration, static crackling on the cheap hallway carpet, then Pearl asked suspiciously, “You swear you’re not gonna hit me?”

Tired of this, a headache beating hard in his skull, possibly the same headache he’d had for the past three weeks, possibly a brand-new one, Mulder snapped, “Yeah, I fucking swear. Open the goddamned door.”

He heard the clinking of the chain being drawn off, the snap-back of the dead bolt as Pearl muttered to himself, “Yeah, because you don’t sound very mad, you sound perfectly calm.”

The door opened, and Mulder was face-to-face with Anthony Pearl for the first time. The reporter was younger than he had pictured in his mind, though he had known that Pearl was only a few years out of college, the man’s youth had been a Woodward and Bernstein-esque, wonder-kid sidebar to the whole story.

The whole fucking story.

Pearl looked even younger than he was, though, his face dusted with freckles like a paper boy, his brown hair trimmed short and yet somehow still mussed up, his eyes blue and wide, guileless, and Mulder thought that the man had better learn how to cultivate a better poker face, if he was gonna make journalism his life’s work.

Possibly adding to Pearl’s aura of boyishness was the fact that the man was stark terrified, clearly not yet over his fear that Mulder had come to beat him dead.

Mulder had spent three weeks embroiled in an intricate, all-encompassing hatred for this man, cursing him and feeling the harsh roll of his stomach whenever he heard Pearl’s name, and he hadn’t expected his despised nemesis to be so . . . well, so fucking young.

Mulder strode in, brushing Pearl aside with his shoulder, and took in the cluttered, tornadoed apartment as Pearl moved his eyes searchingly up and down the hallway as if looking for reinforcements, or witnesses, and then hesitantly closed the door behind him.

There were stacks of books on every available surface, canting to one side or the other, precariously fighting off the drag of gravity, chocked into the corners of the room, pushing out of an overstuffed bookshelf, books with broken spines left open on the coffee table, on the couch, on the floor, books with passages highlighted in glowing blue, or thinly circled by a black ballpoint, pages turned down or interrupted with a bookmark, sometimes not even a real bookmark, but a playing card, a baseball card, a grocery store receipt, an old subway ticket. There were books on baseball and sports reporting and investigative journalism and voodoo and the 1977 New York Yankees. Fiction books and almanacs and textbooks and technical manuals and books of statistics and poetry and essays and children’s books with pictures in them, a world of words, and where there weren’t books there were newspapers and magazines and print-outs of computer articles and yellow legal pads with the pages crowded with scrawled handwriting.

There was no television that Mulder could see, and he had the sneaking feeling that if he looked in the refrigerator, he would be met with a cold vacant cavity, maybe a few jars of condiments or some frozen dinners, no real food, the week’s meal budget having been spent on the latest best-seller, the latest landmark non-fiction tome, same as last week, and the week before, and the week before that.

“Jesus, Pearl,” he said, a bit stunned.

“What?” Pearl asked defensively, scanning the room and evidently seeing nothing at all strange with this orgy of language, this hemorrhage of literature.

Mulder shook his head, and Pearl eyed him guardedly, looking like he was about to bolt. Unsettled by Mulder’s silence, Pearl paced back and forth once, twice, restless, his hands going to his hips, then falling back to his sides, then crossing briefly over his chest. Finally, the reporter’s unease got the best of him, and he asked, “All right, what? Why’d you come over here, if it’s not to beat me up? ‘Cause, I mean . . . you’re _not_ going to beat me up, right?”

Pearl’s hands were flighty as small birds, fluttering around him, not content to stay still. His anxiety was like a physical being in the room, jittery and making Mulder nervous.

“Calm down, Pearl, Jesus,” he implored, the pain in his head making everything bleary and overexposed.

Mulder had had a headache for days, weeks, ever since that morning in Billy Beane’s office, when everything that mattered had come to an end just as everything silly and insignificant had begun.

The press conference Beane had organized after the game that night had gone well, Zito lying like it was as natural to him as breathing, which was strange for Mulder, because he couldn’t recall ever having heard Zito lie about anything before that day. Zito had never had cause to lie, before that day.

But Zito had fooled the reporters, shooting them looks of exasperation and goodwill and camaraderie, making them laugh, every word he said ringing with the undercurrent of ‘Hey, come on, guys, you know me. Like I would ever lie to you.’

And they had believed him, because how could you not believe Zito, when he looked at you with those laughing eyes of his, when he winked and hooked a grin across his face, when he started talking with his hands, getting all animated and goofy, when he floored you with his humor and charm, his clean young heart, how could you not fall for it? How could you not fall for _him?_

Mulder had only been able to follow along meekly, feeling barely adequate next to Zito’s masterful performance, nodding where he was supposed to, agreeing with whatever came out of the other man’s mouth.

The press had swallowed it, hook, line and sinker, and the tumult around them slowly began to die down. Oh, sure, some of the guys were still skittish around them, jumpy like there were yappy dogs biting at their ankles, not looking Mulder in the eye, not slapping either of them as casually on the butt as they had done before, but most of their teammates and friends laughed it off, thought it was a helluva good joke to play on the reporters who lived for such a scandal.

All this should have made Mulder happy, should have made his life settle back down to where it had been, should have calmed his hectic mind and let him return his focus to playing ball, pitching his heart out every five days, chasing the pennant, the uncomplicated goals that he had always believed were everything he wanted.

It wasn’t so much working, though.

First off, there was the unrelenting, icicle-sharp grip of the headache that had become as much a part of him as his fingerprints. Every moment of every day, the pain traveled with him, beating, thick and awful, his constant companion. Aspirin had become his fifth food group, two chalky white pills every four hours like clockwork, not upping the dosage even when the medication failed to do anything but vaguely dull the pain, rub away the edges only slightly, because he knew he couldn’t afford to be groggy or out of it, not in the shuddering faded twilight of August, the cool dry leaves-turning start of September, not as the race for the division was picking up speed and beginning to tick down with urgency.

Secondly, there was the fact that he had stopped sleeping. Not altogether, of course . . . well, yes, actually, he had stopped sleeping altogether. Drifting off for snatched uncomfortable half-hours on planes and buses and even in the dugout, that really didn’t count, especially not when he was bolted out of his unsteady drowses by hellish fever dreams so vivid and intense he could still taste the sharp sour bite of adrenaline on his tongue after he woke up. Every night, his body pulsing with exhaustion, his head a flare of pain, his muscles quivering with the desperate need for rest, he would collapse into bed, and immediately his scathing eyes would flick open and his mind would start to whir and fling pictures and words at him, terrible crippling things, images of himself that made him press his clenched fists against his eyes until agonizing razor-wires of light ripped through his head, and he would lie there helpless, unable to quiet any part of himself, the night sinking away slow and thick as tar, until he dragged himself up in the milky cold light of dawn, so unimaginably tired he was almost weeping with it.

Third of all . . . well, third of all was Zito.

Zito.

Zito and his devastated eyes, Zito and his slack form, all the strength scraped out of him, Zito and his shaking hands, Zito and his beautiful face gone still and empty like a painting, Zito and the tremor in his voice that only Mulder could hear, Zito, pale with heavy insomniac bruises under his eyes, Zito who had somehow become a shadow, a phantom, not all there, someone less than real, like you could put your hand right through him, as if he was vapor, Zito in the blurry sideways slants of his vision, on the tip of his tongue, around the edges of his awareness, and Mulder was never sure who was being haunted and who was doing the haunting.

Third of all was what was going to be the end of him. It didn’t help at all for Mulder to know that he was the one who had set them both on this brutal, inhuman course, Mulder was the one who had forced them to this. The fact that Mulder had broken Zito’s heart didn’t mean that Mulder’s heart was in any fewer pieces.

For three weeks now, Mulder had done nothing but miss Zito. He kept half turning, expecting to find Zito right there beside him, and being met with only air. He kept reaching out in the night, and finding himself totally alone. Mulder didn’t know how to deal with this. He had always prided himself on being able to hold back from this kind of all-consuming emotion, he had structured his life so that nothing could hurt him this badly. Mulder couldn’t understand what was happening to him, but he knew that he was locked in too tight to breathe, that his wrecked nights and Zito’s broken heart, his torturous memories and Zito’s forgotten smile, his bewildered misery and Zito’s demolished faith in him, all of it made them inseparable, linked them together so that they shared blood and breath and sorrow, each of them lost in the other, spinning and falling and out of their minds as they tried to put their lives back together, and discovered that there are some wounds that refuse to heal.

Even the game could bring him no solace, which was probably the worst part about it. Whenever Mulder had nowhere else to turn, he had always turned to the game, and now he couldn’t even do that, he couldn’t use baseball to escape from the vicious things that clawed away inside him, the field was no home to him, the game came to nothing now. Mulder would be standing on the mound, leaned forward to peer in at the catcher’s signs, his arm dangling loose, the ball sweeping slowly like a pendulum, his shoulder warm, the muscles buzzing, the way it got when he was throwing hard and well, and then suddenly, in between deciding whether to pitch a slider or a brush-back, a singular picture would burst into his mind, like a flashbulb exploding, taking over every one of his senses, and he would see Zito doused by the spring-training sunlight, half the Arizona desert in his hair and crinkling in the corners of his eyes, or he would feel Zito’s mouth pressed hard and hot on his neck, his shoulder, low on his stomach, teeth scraping, third-degree burning him, branding him, or he would smell the salt of Zito’s skin, taste the man’s sweat on his tongue, or he would hear Zito’s voice telling him not to worry, because everything was going to be okay. Everything was going to be okay.

Mulder still came to the ballpark every day, still got paid to do it, and this was all he had ever wanted to do, but at some point pitching had become just another job, and the game had become what he did, not who he was.

Fuck the Mariners and their half-game lead. Fuck the pennant. Fuck baseball.

All Mulder wanted was Zito.

And that completely fucking petrified him.

Now here he was in Anthony Pearl’s apartment, which he’d found himself standing in front of after wandering the city for hours, trying to tire himself out enough so that he could maybe get some sleep, all the streets looking the same, actively trying to get lost, bitterly resentful when he recognized a certain park or harbor, hating the old steady beat of the current in the bay, the Bay Bridge with its impossible steel height crowding out the crystallized night sky.

Eventually Mulder had been standing before a building that looked deja-vu familiar, though he was pretty sure he had never been there before. He had checked the address and was shocked to recognize it from the time when he had, on a whim, looked up Anthony Pearl’s name in the phone book, never expecting the reporter to be actually listed, but there he was, between Andrew Pearl and Aurora Pearl, the latter of which was the kind of name that you would only find in San Francisco, home to forty years worth of misplaced flower children.

Not even thinking about what he was going to say, Mulder had slipped into the apartment building behind another tenant who was awkwardly shuffling her grocery bags, her dog’s leash, and her door key, and then Mulder had stood for ten minutes in Pearl’s hallway before summoning the courage (courage? How could he be afraid of a guy like Pearl?) to knock.

And Pearl wanted to know what he was doing there, which was a fair question. Mulder couldn’t exactly tell him that the end of Mulder’s life had coincided exactly with the moment a month ago when Pearl had approached Zito in that bar, and even if he could, what was he expecting Pearl to do about it?

Mulder looked at Pearl, standing there all unnerved and scared, and asked quietly, “Why’d you do it?”

Pearl blinked, his eyes flashing with different possible interpretations, then said, baffled, “Excuse me?”

All the muscles in Mulder’s body went shivery, his legs failing him, and he let himself collapse onto the sofa, surrounded by the rubbed-soft pages of books, that yellowing old-manuscript smell of libraries. The yielding plaid cushions felt excruciatingly good sinking down under his worn-out body.

He sighed, deep and fierce, and tilted forward, propping his elbows on his knees and taking his throbbing head into his hands. He spoke staring down at the floor, his eyes tracking along the sinewy patterns in the carpet, “Why’d you write that fucking story? You got some grudge against us? Did I make fun of your mom or something? Did Zito kill your pet hamster? Why would you want to do this to us, I’ve never even fucking _met_ you before.”

Pearl’s voice came to him, loose and disembodied, “It . . . it was news, man. I was given a gift, a . . . a gift from God, a blockbuster story that no one else had. How am I supposed to ignore that?”

Mulder raised his head, skewering Pearl with his anger and his despair. He saw Pearl take in a surprised breath, and knew that he must look utterly obliterated. “Well, congratulations. Now you’re a fucking celebrity, and never mind that you’ve ruined two lives on your way to the top.”

Pearl laughed in disbelief, rolling his eyes, saying with sarcasm coating his voice, “Oh yeah, I’m a real big celebrity, I’m famous.” He shook his head. “Jesus, Mulder, where have you been? Since that press conference the two of you gave, I’ve been persona non grata in the world of sports journalism.”

Pearl came over to sit in the armchair next to the sofa, moving a stack of Sports Illustrateds out of his way. “My editor has got me covering minor league ball in Fresno and Mayor Willie Brown’s official statement that Willie Mays was a pretty good guy, in case we didn’t know that before. Everybody in the country knows me as the reporter who was dumb enough to fall for a joke and publish my gullibility in the paper. Every other reporter’s pissed off at me because they bought into my story, and now we all look stupid. Everyone thinks I was duped by a drunk ballplayer, so how about you knock off being mad at me for all the great benefits I’ve reaped from this ridiculous farce?”

Mulder, speaking by rote, like he was reading a script, replied, “You _are_ the one who got duped, though, you’re the one who fell for it, seems like everybody’s got it pretty right.”

“No, they don’t.”

Mulder looked up at Pearl’s clear, untainted words, and found the reporter studying him with close appraisal, his expression disconcertingly resolute for someone so young. “What do you mean?” Mulder asked.

Pearl tilted forward, never letting his eyes leave the other man’s. “Every word Zito told me in the bar that night was true. And you know that as well as I do.”

Mulder’s mouth fell open, and his mind stuttered, stumbling over various automatic denials, unable to make any of the responses stick in his brain for longer than a fraction of a second, feeling like there were pieces he was missing, there was some way to explain this, talk his way out of it, but he had no idea what it was.

Pearl continued, taking Mulder’s shock in stride. “Nobody else was there that night, and nobody believes me, and I’ve stopped pushing it, because I was starting to sound like a nut conspiracy theorist, but I was there. I know what happened. Zito was telling me the truth. He wasn’t messing with me, he wasn’t joking.”

Pearl raised his hand, making little finger taps on the air to add weight to his words. “I’m a reporter, man. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to be. The entire basis of my job, my life, is separating truth from fiction. Do you really think I’d write that story if I wasn’t one-hundred percent certain, absolutely and no-doubt convinced, that it was true? Do you really think I can’t recognize when someone is so in love it’s coming out their eyes like a spill of light?”

Pearl let loose a rush of air, leaned back in the chair, as if the effort of the words had taken more out of him than he had expected. Mulder was staring, flabbergasted. Pearl was nothing like what he expected, straightforward and honest where Mulder had thought he’d be shifty and dissembling, young and still enamored of the truth where Mulder had thought he’d be jaded and cynical. Somehow Mulder knew he could trust this man, and that was the last thing he had ever expected to think when he confronted the reporter.

“Pearl, are we . . . is this off the record?” Mulder asked cautiously, something like a confession welling up within him.

Something flitted past in Pearl’s eyes, a zip of kicked-up attention, but his face remained impassive. “Yeah. Of course. We’re just sitting here talking.”

Mulder eyed him. “You’ll excuse me if I have a little trouble believing you right off the bat. Off the record, totally and completely, no chance of any of this ending up on the front page tomorrow?”

Pearl nodded, affirming, “No chance.”

Mulder rambled on, though he already believed Pearl. Mulder knew he was just trying to forestall what would come next, trying to hold back this immense thing that was moving inside of him. “’Cause if you report anything that’s said tonight, any single word of it, you tell anybody I was here, I’ll come back, and I _will_ hit you then, man, I’ll beat you into next week, and it doesn’t really feel like we’re off the record, so—”

Pearl cut him off, saying exasperated, “I don’t flip a switch or anything, Mulder, we’re off the damn record! Say what you’ve got to say.”

Mulder took a long moment, staring down at his hands, thinking about Zito’s hands, moving over his body, calluses on the tips of his fingers, roughened skin to remind him of the trembling power of his guitar strings, the gentle stretching shadows of his fingers slipping over Mulder’s ribs, tapping out Morse code on his chest, working out the password to his heart.

Mulder felt something crooked wrench violently inside him, like he was being thrown out of his orbit, and suddenly he was bent forward, covering his face up, every part of him breaking into shards, and he said, his voice crippled and falling like a moan, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, and I can’t get past it, I can’t get over him. He never looks at me anymore, he never smiles. I don’t care about anything else, and I can’t sleep, and the only thing I want is him.”

Mulder half-sobbed, though his eyes were dry, tremors snaking through his body, his palms pressed to his eyes, and he was so tired, he was so fucking tired. “I can’t do anything without him. He’s everything, and I lost him. I fucking lost him, and now I don’t know how to get him back, and I’m so scared. I’m so fucking scared.”

There were the soft fabric sounds of Pearl rising from the armchair and coming to sit next to Mulder on the couch, and when the reporter carefully placed a hand on Mulder’s shoulder, the pitcher jerked away, terrified to feel someone else’s comforting touch on his wicked body. Pearl wouldn’t let him go, though, closing his hand firmly on the other man’s shoulder, grounding him, holding him in place.

“Hey,” Pearl said, his voice low and stunned. “It’s okay, man. You’re all right, it’s okay.”

Mulder tore his hands away from his face and cried, caught between fury and despair, “It’s _not_ okay, it’ll never be okay again! Can’t you . . . can’t you see what’s happening? He hates me, and he should, that’s the way it should be, that’s the way I made it, so it’s never gonna be okay. I’m . . . I’m not all right, I’m a fucking mess.”

Mulder was ripped open, he was falling apart.

Pearl kept his hand strong and motionless on Mulder’s shoulder, and eventually the pitcher raised his shattered eyes to the reporter, saw Pearl looking overwhelmed, his blue eyes huge, his boyish face blinking at Mulder like the pitcher was some kind of alien life form that he had never seen before.

“Mulder, you’ve . . . you’ve got to tell him, man.”

That was almost funny, and Mulder rasped out a disbelieving laugh. “What, so I can see him slam the door in my face? I’m not really thinking that’s gonna solve anything, Pearl.”

Pearl looked at him, his gaze going steady, and said without the slightest tinge to his voice, “You’re an idiot.”

The balls on this guy . . .

Mulder stared at him incredulously, his eyes glinting, unable to believe that Pearl had really just said that. “Well, thanks a lot, man, I’m really fucking glad I unburdened my soul to you,” he snapped harshly.

Pearl didn’t get angry, didn’t lash back, just pinned Mulder with those damning eyes of his, saying, “It’s true. If you think Zito wouldn’t take you back, if you really think he wouldn’t give his left arm for the chance to be with you again, then you’re so stupid, there aren’t even words to describe the depths of your idiocy.”

Mulder fell back against the couch, dislodging Pearl’s hand, and put his own hand to his temple, where his pulse beat so heavy and hard he expected to feel blood on his fingertips. He spoke with his eyes covered, shut tight, blocking everything out.

“I broke his heart. I destroyed him. I made him take this incredible thing, this thing he believed in like the Pope believes in God, I made him take the best part of both of us and tell the whole world it was a lie. He’s so good, Pearl, he’s so honest and right. He’s so much better than I am, and I made him sacrifice himself to save me. To save my worthless life, my fucking ego.”

Taking his hand away, Mulder let himself look at Pearl, and his voice was drained as he said, “Why would he ever want me back? What could I ever do but hurt him again?”

His too-young eyes moving with wisdom far beyond his years, Pearl responded, “Listen, man, I don’t know everything about the two of you, I don’t know much more than what Zito told me that night and what you’ve told me here. But I know I’ve never seen anybody more in love with another person than Zito is with you. You . . . you should have heard him, Mulder, you’re his whole world.”

Pearl sighed, ran a hand through his hair, leaving bits of it tufting up on his head. “When I was trying to decide if I should do the story, if it would be ethically right to publish someone’s private life like that, I ended up thinking about how Zito was so sure of you, so certain that you’d eventually figure out that you needed him and then he’d take you back. And I thought that there was nothing I could do that could change that, it was out of my power to break the two of you apart. I didn’t think it mattered if you guys were in love in secret or in the open, because you were _so_ in love, you could get through anything.

“When Zito denied the story, I thought maybe I was wrong, and it’s honestly not been the best couple of weeks for me, thinking I was responsible for that, but . . . Jesus, Mulder, look at yourself. You’ve come here in the middle of the night and told me all this stuff, told a _reporter_ all this stuff, and not just any reporter, but the one reporter in the world that you actually have the least cause to trust, you’ve said all this to me, and yet you don’t think Zito’s something real enough to fight for? He is, man. He’s waiting for you. I’ve spent all of an hour with him drunk in a bar, and I can still tell you that he’d wait the rest of his life for you, you’ve got every piece of his heart.”

The words hit Mulder deep, resonating, but he couldn’t shake the memory of the look on Zito’s face for the past three weeks, that irreparably damaged abyss in his eyes. Mulder shook his head, unconsciously, trying to banish the image.

Pearl asked, a wedge of light from the kitchen backlighting him, making a little scrim glow around his head, “Mulder, what are you afraid of?”

Mulder lifted his head, his eyes dark with anguish, and said roughly, “Everything. Everything. I’m afraid of what I’ve become, this . . . this terrible thing I’ve done. I’m afraid of what I’ll destroy next.”

Pearl shook his head, his brow furrowing. “You’ve already broken his heart. You’ve already broken your own. The worst has already happened. You try to get him back and he says no, then you’ll still be in the same place, but at least you’ll have tried. So, what are you afraid of?”

Feeling like the ache in his head had spread to his bones, his heart, his whole being, Mulder replied, his voice cracking, “I don’t know.”

His eyes shifting like clouds across the sky, painted with reasons and argument, Pearl asked, “Are you afraid you’ll lose baseball? You think you’ll get kicked off the team? Have more respect for the game than that, man. You lied to Billy Beane, so you might have to deal with his right hook, but he’s the best GM in the business, and he’s not going to let two twenty game winners go because of something like this.”

Mulder nodded, staring down at the carpet, accepting the logic of it. “I know.”

Pearl remained curious, softly interested, trying to work this out, like it was a puzzle the solution to which was right under his nose, if he could just stumble upon the clues. “So what is it? People look at you different, talk about you different? Are you scared of that?”

Mulder hated the black feeling of agreement in him, the shabby ashamed part of himself that cared about such things. “Yeah. Maybe. It’s just . . . it’s hard to admit that you’re not the man you always thought you were. The man everyone thought you were.”

“Is that the man you want to be, Mulder?”

Mulder looked up, catching a strand of light that speared across his face like honesty, and his eyes were burning. “I want to be a better man. I want to be the kind of man who doesn’t hurt him the way I have.”

The myriad expressions twisting on Pearl’s face, sympathy and compassion and consideration and doubt and speculation, cleared slowly, like the fog sinking away from the bay, and he said, his voice undiluted, steady, “Then go ahead. You know what you want, so go get it.”

Did that make sense? Could it really be that simple? After all this time being alone and confused and frozen with fear, all this time being lost and so far from home, Mulder felt something shift in his chest, and a low, certain voice in his mind told him that it doesn’t always have to be so complicated. Sometimes the answer is right there in front of you, and it turns out to be the easiest thing in the world. Sometimes things just fall into place.

Mulder saw some bright glimmer on the horizon of his mind, and he thought that maybe that was hope. Maybe that was redemption.

Mulder looked at Pearl, the reporter looking back at him evenly with nothing but truth in his eyes, and Mulder was still in pain, still tired, still scared, but he felt like he could stand up now. Maybe he could do something about this.

As Mulder rose from the couch, some small trance was broken, both of them taking a brief moment to shake themselves free from the intense emotions of the past few minutes, and Mulder was embarrassed for a second as he realized how much of his heart and soul this virtual stranger had been witness to.

Pearl crooked a hesitant smile, and Mulder knew he didn’t have to worry, didn’t have to be ashamed of anything that had transpired here.

Casting a skeptical eye around the room, Mulder said, his voice wavering only slightly, “You’ve got too many books, Pearl.”

Pearl laughed at that, relief humming through him, and replied, “No such thing, man.”

Grinning, his features feeling stretched out of form, it had been so long since the expression had visited his face, Mulder offered his hand to the other man. “Yeah, you’re probably right. Hell, I’m only a couple of years removed from comic books, I’m definitely not one to talk.”

Pearl took his hand, and for a moment, the two men just looked at each other, linked and with so much between them, the air was thick and hard to breathe in.

“Thanks, Pearl,” Mulder said, his voice staggered with sincerity.

Pearl smiled at him, his eyes mild, the color of the sky on the first day of the playoffs. “You can call me ‘Earl’ if you want. Your better half seemed quite attached to the name.” They grinned at each other, and Mulder knew what Zito had meant by wanting to make it real, wanting to share their secret with another person.

Pearl let go of his hand, saying seriously, “Good luck, Mulder.”

Mulder nodded, his heart tangled up in his throat, and left before all his strength fled out of him.

*

Zito wasn’t home.

He wasn’t fucking home.

What the _hell_ kind of evil fucking joke was this for God to pull?

Mulder stared disbelieving at the door to Zito’s apartment, unable to comprehend that, after everything, after the fucker of a night he’d had, everything he’d been through and come to terms with, somehow Zito wasn’t even there for him to make things right again.

Mulder paced back and forth across the little patch of carpet in front of the door, three steps one way, then three steps back, his frustration making him restless and predatory.

There was a fine sheen of sweat on Mulder’s body, slicking his hair, his arms and legs trembling hard, evidence of his all-out sprint from Pearl’s apartment to Zito’s, up the forty-five degree angle hills (and whose brilliant idea had it been to build a city on a series of roller-coasters, for Christ’s sake?), through the still silent parks, dashing through the puddles of gleaming yellow streetlight, running across streets against the signal, the screech of horns, the incoherent curses of the nighttime drivers, his shoes pounding on the concrete, the buildings shooting up like sheer slate-gray cliffs around him, catching sight of his blurred, frantic reflection in the dark store windows, all his years of baseball and his strong well-built athlete’s body finally being put to good use, as if the only reason he’d ever played the game, the only reason he’d ever kept in such good shape was for this crucial moment, the only reason for his power and speed and long legs was so that he could get to Zito as quickly as possible, so that he could race across a city in the deep crush of past-midnight, the ice-chip stars watching him dispassionately, the moon like a saint, so high above him.

And then Zito wasn’t even fucking home.

Mulder pounded on the door one last time, the heel of his fist aching from the abuse, for once not caring about neighbors or getting caught, for once not giving a damn what anyone else thought, calling out, “Zito! For fuck’s sake, man, open the door! It’s good news, I swear to God, I’m not gonna hurt you again! Never gonna hurt you again, dude, please open the door!”

He contemplated briefly on the trend his life seemed to be taking of him banging on doors and begging to be let in, and slapped his hand against the wood, the vibration of the impact burring in his fingers.

Nothing.

No sound trickling out, no strip of light flooding from under the door, not the slightest hint to suggest that Zito was home and just hiding from him.

“Fuck,” Mulder said, falling against the wall, leaning on his shoulder. “Fuckety fuck fuck.”

Heaving a huge, whooshing sigh, Mulder slowly levered himself up and then went down to sit on the front step and wait for Zito to come home.

Some things are too important to leave until tomorrow.

Mulder needed to do this now, he needed to get Zito back _tonight_ , this night, this ebony black embrace of time. Mulder didn’t know how long he would be full of this crashing urgency, this radiant flare of purpose, he was desperately afraid that if he spent another night alone, lying awake and second-guessing everything, his masochistic mind would betray him, talk him out of it, and he would be right back where he started from. With nothing to show for any of it.

Zito’s front step was hard. “Fucking concrete,” Mulder muttered, scooting around, wrapping his arms around himself, trying to find a comfortable position. Giving it up as hopeless, he settled in as best he could, his eyes flicking back and forth down the street, wishing to see that familiar silhouette, Zito’s perfect form cutting through the night, wanting the streetlights to flash down on a shock of messy hair, spotlighting an unlined young face with eyes as bright as newborn stars and a sweet quirking grin. Maybe Zito would be wearing one of his crazy neon shirts, something with sequins or silver threads tracing Japanese patterns, maybe he would be glowing, visible from a block away through the shadows, maybe he would be just wearing his old green sweatshirt and jeans, and maybe he would be glowing anyway.

Mulder tilted his head against the cold stone column of the doorway, yawning, his jaw cracking. The force of the night began to settle on him, his three weeks of horribly uninterrupted consciousness catching up with him. His physical and emotional exhaustion made him heavy, his arms feeling like wet cement, his eyes smoldering, falling to half-mast.

Mulder let his eyes close for just a minute, just to soak some moisture into them, thinking about rain clattering on a slippery wooden dock, and strings of hotel beds, every one the same as the one that came before, and skyscrapers, and homemade confetti of scorecards and construction paper snowing down into his hair, and catches of breath, and hit-and-running, and strong musician’s fingers curling around his own on a scuffed baseball, showing him how to throw a curve that would break twelve to six and defy the laws of physics, and tousled summer grass, and Fenway Park, and Zito smiling, his face caught flush in the full July sun, and how he had been the most beautiful thing Mulder had ever seen.

“Mulder.”

And Zito’s voice, yeah, that was a good thing to think about too. Mulder smiled in his sleep, pulling his arms a little tighter around his body, wondering why it was so cold in his bedroom.

“Mulder.”

A hand on his arm, shaking him slightly, which was . . . nice, he supposed, but didn’t really fit in with all the rest of his disjointed, fragmented happy thoughts.

“Mulder, dude, wake up.”

Mulder started, jerked out of his lazy doze. He blinked, his mind smothered with the loose cotton of an abrupt return to awareness. His eyes cleared, and he saw Zito, standing over him, quickly taking his hand off Mulder’s arm and stepping back once he was sure the other man was fully awake.

Zito stared at him warily, a faint aura of fear and sorrow surrounding him, shadows drifting across his face from the doorway lights and the moon, making his eyes hooded and unreadable, the line of his jaw starkly defined, his disheveled hair falling at dramatic angles over his ears and across his forehead, the ends sun-tipped even in the dense night, and for some reason Mulder couldn’t speak.

Zito stuffed his hands into his pockets and looked away, gazing down the street, his profile traced solemnly in the dim light, and Mulder, who had visualized this moment perhaps a million times in the three weeks since he had last spoken to the other man, had never once pictured himself struck dumb, his mind suddenly gone blank, unable to do anything but stare at Zito, feeling like his eyes were swallowing up his whole face, big as half dollars.

“What are you doing here, man?” Zito asked, his voice stripped of any sort of emotion, and he still wasn’t looking at Mulder.

Mulder felt his mouth open, his lungs full and ready to push words out, but there was nothing inside him.

“I told you I needed some time. And, no, three weeks is not enough time. Come see me in three years, maybe,” Zito continued, the planes of his face tight, like if he let one part of himself relax, the rest would fall to pieces as well.

Mulder finally scraped something out of himself, asking, his voice thick from the half-sleep and all the reckless possibilities that were scrolling inside him, “Where were you?”

Zito shrugged, his loose windbreaker rustling with the movement, his eyes still scanning the dark street, the illuminated streetlights hovering weightlessly like planets, and answered dully, “Out. Walking around. I don’t know.”

Mulder blinked at the knowledge that Zito had been wandering the city too, and wondered if he had been doing that for the whole unbearable length of the three weeks, same as Mulder, and how close the two of them had come to turning a corner and running into each other at some cold lonesome four in the morning. He wondered what they would have said to each other, if they had. What they might have done to each other.

Zito lifted his arm and pulled his hand across his face, a grimace snagging his mouth, and Mulder knew Zito wouldn’t be able to stand being around him for much longer.

Desperate to keep the other man from leaving, Mulder spoke quickly, blurting out the first thing that came to his mind, “I went to see Anthony Pearl tonight.”

Zito’s head snapped around, forgetting that he didn’t want to look at Mulder, and the stunned look on his face would have been funny, under different circumstances. “You . . . you what?” he asked, his eyebrows arcing upwards, his eyes wide with disbelief. “Oh, Jesus, Mulder, you didn’t hit him, did you? Fuck, you can’t just go around beating up reporters, how is that gonna make anything better? He’s gonna file a police report, you’re gonna get arres—”

Mulder raised his hands to try and calm the other man down, breaking into his panicked rant, “No, I, I didn’t hit him, I didn’t—why does everyone think that my one goal in life is to kick the shit out of Anthony Pearl?”

Zito shrugged, slipping back into a defensive pose, remembering that he didn’t want to be having this conversation, he didn’t want to have anything to do with Mulder, sitting on his front step at three in the morning. “I dunno. Maybe ‘cause you’ve spent the past three weeks spitting whenever you hear his name.”

There was a moment of silence that stretched out long and keening between them, then Zito asked for the second time, his voice gone bleak again, “What are you doing here?”

Mulder wished Zito would come and sit with him on the step. He wanted to rise, go to the other man, but he didn’t trust his legs to hold him up. He spoke to Zito, his face tilted upwards like he was searching the sky for some evidence of heaven, some proof of God.

“Pearl, he . . . he said some things. He’s not such a bad guy. I guess . . . I guess I can see how you would have wanted to open up to him.”

Which was perhaps the understatement of the decade, because Mulder hadn’t just opened up to Pearl, he had basically dug his heart out of his chest and thrown it down on the reporter’s coffee table.

Zito’s eyes narrowed angrily, “So what, this is you forgiving me? Saying you understand how I could have been so stupid? Well, gee, Mulder, thanks a lot, but save it, okay? I don’t need to be absolved of anything by you, we’re done, remember?”

Mulder remembered.

He felt bruised inside of himself, his heart a battered untrustworthy thing, and he needed to make Zito understand why he’d come. “That’s . . . that’s not what I was saying. I . . . Pearl, he told me some stuff. He said maybe I haven’t . . . haven’t ruined everything. Maybe we’re not so far gone that I can’t make it right again.”

Looking at him, his tense shoulders falling slightly in surprise, an easy breeze fluttering through his hair and making brittle new-autumn leaves skip around his feet, Zito asked slowly, “What are you talking about?”

Zito was standing there in front of him, solid and real with a piece of duct tape holding together one of his sneakers, a rip in the shoulder of his light coat, revealing a little slash of the navy blue cotton shirt underneath, a hole big enough for two fingers in the knee of his jeans, a healing scrape on the heel of his hand, from Zito’s headfirst dive after a bunt pop-up in the game two days ago, Zito was standing there in front of him, looking sort of beat-up, sort of lost, looking worn down to the bone, Zito was standing there in front of him, lit up by the moon, and never before, not once in all his life, had Mulder been so sure of what he wanted.

The words were jamming into his head now, crashing against each other, caroming around like pool balls, and Mulder tried desperately to sort them out, put them in some comprehensible order, so that he wouldn’t just end up babbling things like ‘want’ and ‘need’ and ‘heart’ and ‘everything’ and ‘forgive me’.

“Zito, I’ve been . . . I’ve been such an asshole, and I’m so sorry, I can’t even begin to tell you how sorry I am. I was stupid and blind and scared, you were right, you know, you were right from the start. I was scared of you, and the way I felt, ‘cause I’d never felt anything like that before, it was this huge thing, it was so much bigger than I was, and I couldn’t understand it, and it fucking terrified me. But that wasn’t real fear, ‘cause then I lost you, I made you lie and I wrecked everything, and you wouldn’t look at me, and I couldn’t touch you, and I was all alone, and I knew real fear then, I’ve been so fucking scared for so fucking long, because I don’t know how to do anything without you, I don’t know how to _be_ anything without you. And I don’t want to feel this way anymore. I just want you back, and I know I don’t deserve it, I know there’s no reason for you to take me back, but Pearl said you would, and he’s a pretty smart guy, so maybe you will, I don’t know. I just know that I can’t do this anymore, because you’re everything I’ve ever needed and I want you to be sure of me again.”

So much for not babbling.

Zito’s eyes through Mulder’s breathless ramble just kept getting bigger and bigger, until Mulder almost expected them to drop right out of their sockets, Zito’s hands coming out of his pockets in slow-motion, and by the end of it, Zito was stunned and motionless, as still as if he’d been carved out of stone

Mulder, his soul spilled out onto the street, his whole life hanging in the balance, wished with everything in him that Zito would say something, _anything_ , and when Zito didn’t, the shock striking language from his tongue, Mulder rushed ahead, because if he just kept talking, at least Zito wouldn’t be able to tell him no.

“I know this probably doesn’t make much sense, after the way I’ve been, but you gotta understand, Zito, I’ve been fighting you tooth and nail for most of the season now, ever since this thing started between us. I didn’t want to feel this way about you, because I thought I had to be this certain guy, this ideal ballplayer, a real man, and there was nothing in the way I felt about you that matched the image I thought I had to live up to. These . . . these expectations of what I was supposed to be. Like, God forbid that anyone ever find out that the great Mark Mulder is sleeping with a man. God forbid that anyone ever find out that Mark Mulder is lost without this man. And you knew it months ago, ‘cause you’re so much smarter than I am, but it took me until tonight to realize that I don’t want to be someone else’s ideal. I don’t want to be someone else’s picture of a real man. I just want to be the man who gets to come home to you at the end of the day. And to hell with the game, if they can’t understand. You messed me up, Zito, you really did a job on me, because at some point baseball stopped being the only thing I cared about. Baseball means shit without you. I can hardly even believe I just said that, but it’s true. I could never throw another pitch in my life, but if I had you, I think I could still be happy. I think I could still be whole.”

Mulder drew in a shuddering breath, and remembered the most important thing, he remembered the one thing that he had forgotten to say. “And also I love you. I’m in love with you. I love you and all I am is the guy who loves you. And I didn’t know that, because I didn’t know anything, but I know that now, I know that like I know the sky is blue. I love you. So maybe you should say something now.”

Zito took a shuffling half-step forward, almost like he was hypnotized, one hand stretching forward dreamily, like he was offering to help Mulder stand, then Zito caught sight of the unconscious gesture and stopped dead, his hand falling quickly, softly colliding with his blue-jeaned leg, and Zito just stared rapt again, before he finally let out an astonished breath, and traveling on that breath was one word: “Mulder.”

Which was at least something.

Mulder, knowing he had dissolved into something senseless and pleading, cleared his throat, tried to settle his chaotic mind, and said hoarsely, his voice hitching, “Come sit down.”

There was a throbbing second of consideration, like the moment after the pitch but before the umpire’s call, when everyone in the stadium is holding their breath, waiting to see whether elation or crushing disappointment will flood them, and then Zito shifted forward, moving so slowly Mulder felt like he was watching him come frame-by-frame, until Zito sank down beside him on the step, never once taking his eyes from Mulder’s face.

They sat there together, six inches apart, not touching, and all they did for an eternity was look at each other, and Mulder thought that if all he was ever allowed to do was just sit here next to Zito, looking at him silently, then that would still be good enough.

When Zito finally spoke, it was barely a whisper, the words falling almost inaudibly onto the step between them, “You really fucked me up, you know that?”

Mulder nodded, his throat dry, replying, “Fucked myself up pretty bad too.”

They fell silent again, and Mulder was watching the patched colors of the night shamble across Zito’s face, watching for news of his fate. His salvation was so close, he could almost taste it, his heart beating out of rhythm in anticipation, and Mulder asked the one question that would let him know whether he would be let in from the cold, “Did you . . . did you ever figure out how to fall out of love with me?”

A car drove past on the street, and the headlights swept across Zito’s face, making his eyes shine with something inviolate, and when the car had gone, the dazzling glow didn’t fade, like Zito was spot-lit, stunned with light from the inside out, and when he blinked, a single tear began to track slowly down his cheek, and Zito answered, his voice uneven, scoured rough from all that he had been through, “It’s . . . it’s the strangest thing, you know? I tried, I honestly did, I tried so hard to get rid of you, I did everything I could think of to stop loving you, but it was no good. I couldn’t stop. I never could.”

Mulder felt all the joy he had ever known building up within him, rattling him like a grenade had detonated in his chest, and he wanted to grab Zito and hug the air out of him, he wanted to kiss away the tear and promise that Zito would never again have reason to cry, and he wanted to spend the rest of his life fulfilling that promise.

Zito was still trying to hold back from the rush of emotion, trying to make his voice strong as his eyes shaded deeper and deeper with something hushed and miraculous, “There’s stuff we gotta talk about, you know. Lots of stuff.”

Mulder knew. After everything that had happened, they couldn’t just go back to where they had been, there were other considerations. The press, the ballclub. How in the hell were they supposed to go about telling the world, after admitting it once, then denying it? Would they even tell the world? Starting this again would be light-years more difficult than it had been the first time, it would take everything they had just to keep their heads above water.

But it was them. It was Mulder and Zito, and together they could do anything.

A piece of Zito’s hair fell down across his forehead, a skinny backslash over his eyebrow, and without thinking, Mulder reached up and brushed it away, then paused with his hand on Zito’s face, noticing that he was shaking a little bit, his fingertips drumming lightly on Zito’s temple.

Zito closed his eyes, and subtly turned his face into Mulder’s hand, and Mulder felt his heart open up like it had wings.

He ran his thumb over Zito’s cheekbone, trailed his fingers across the man’s mouth and over his eyelids, feeling the sleepy questions of Zito’s mind under the fragile skin, and it was as if he was touching Zito for the first time, and he was captivated, he was amazed. Mulder slid his hand down Zito’s throat, feeling the sandpaper rasp of his stubble and the rumble of his pulse, skidding across the slippery fabric of his windbreaker, stealing inside, over the wrinkled-soft map of his shirt, finally placing his hand flat on Zito’s chest, holding the man’s heart carefully in his palm.

When Zito breathed out a long, low sigh, Mulder felt it come from deep inside the other man’s body, and watched as the air fell from his lips in a tumbling cloud that broke open and disintegrated almost immediately.

“It’s getting cold,” Mulder whispered, moving to wrap his other arm with painstaking care around Zito’s shoulders, shifting by inches, waiting for Zito to stiffen and pull away, but Zito only made a small sound like he had just realized the answer to some age-old riddle, and settled into the curve of the other man’s form, his weight feeling impossibly good, indescribably right as he fit himself against Mulder’s body.

Zito opened his eyes, looking like forever, and said softly, “Summer’s coming to an end.”

Mulder nodded, feeling overcome, feeling restored, and moved his head down slowly until it rested on Zito’s shoulder, his eyes hidden, finally warm again, finally at peace, and Mulder thought that he might laugh, or cry, or let fall some other tender breakdown of emotion that had no words to describe it. Zito’s hand came up to smooth down his hair, soothing away the last of his pain and fear, and Mulder had never felt anything as wonderful as that. It felt like he’d finally found his way home.

Mulder breathed in and the air filled up his chest like pure white light, like faith, and Mulder said into the delicately flushed skin of Zito’s neck, “The season’s almost over.”

Zito held onto him like he was never going to let go again, and replied, his voice certain like a prayer, “It’s okay. Next year’s gonna be our best yet. I can feel it.”

THE END

 

Well, I stumbled in the darkness  
I’m lost and alone  
Though I said I’d go before us  
And show the way back home  
Is there a light up ahead?  
I can’t hold on very long  
Forgive me, pretty baby, but I always take the long way home

\--Tom Waits


	6. Clean Down to the Bone, or How to Do a Remix

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Remix of the How-To Series, originally posted in May 2006. Because I was still very young when I wrote it the first time, and thought maybe I could do it better.

Clean Down To The Bone  
Or, How To Do A Remix

 

It all went to hell because Zito was stupid.

He didn’t know the guy was a reporter, though Mulder wouldn’t believe that. Zito maybe didn’t really believe it himself, because the moon was gone from the sky and he’d been in the bar for fucking days.

The game had not been good. Mulder, visibly reeling from what Zito had done to him, left everything high and broken down the heart of the plate. Forty-three pitches got him through the first inning. Mulder messed up his hair something awful in the dugout, drilled his fists into his eyes and Zito could hear him talking to himself from all the way down the bench. Zito knew better than to go anywhere near him, saw him biting into the leather of his glove as he disappeared into the tunnel after getting pulled in the third.

So Zito had earned his nine beers tonight. Mulder’s disintegration was give or take sixty percent his fault. The chalk-written letters of the drink menu over the bar flipped over and turned into hieroglyphs, splinters in his hands and greased throat. Mulder was saying in his mind, _you don’t know what you’re fucking talking about._

Zito knew, goddamn it. Better than a fastball on three-and-oh, better than the muscle memory of his best pitch. He knew what he was talking about better than he knew Mark Mulder, so there.

And Anthony Pearl came out of nowhere.

Jack-from-the-bar wouldn’t serve him anymore, and Zito wanted to cry. He wanted Mulder to be waiting for him when he got home, kept trying to remember if he’d made Mulder a spare key. In everything but name, they’d lived together in Zito’s apartment for three months, Mulder’s shoes by the door, Mulder’s freeze-dried coffee on top of the refrigerator, Mulder’s belt wrapped around the towel rack in the bathroom.

Mulder was in love with him. Zito was sure. He was going to write it in permanent marker on the wall of the bathroom, but Anthony Pearl was there instead.

Zito told him. Told him everything. Opened his mouth and let it fly out like he’d been waiting to do all season. Like he was holding a grudge, planning the perfect revenge. Want to deny me, want to pretend you don’t know how it is, fuck you then, and not in the good way. Zito hated him, told all his secrets and he knew in the back of his mind that he would pay for this in blood, every day until the sun exploded.

Pearl wrote nothing down, eyes scanning like recorder tape. He was going to ruin them, make them ash and leave nothing behind. Zito understood that, though only peripherally. His mouth was slippery and his heart a cracked and treacherous thing, stringing him out into a place that lacked gravity.

He went home alone, and stayed that way all night.

The hangover was terrible, and Zito didn’t remember anything from the night before. Mulder wasn’t there. Zito ghosted around his apartment, barefoot and dreaming of the day five months ago when he’d built his courage into a wall around him and pushed his hand into Mulder’s pants. Thinking fitfully that he was protected from on high, and Mulder couldn’t hurt him, bruises heal, fucking rookie journalists weren’t allowed to touch men like him.

Zito avoided the sports section, ripped it up into strips and scattered it to the wind for the birds to use in their nests. This wasn’t the life he wanted, though he was certain that Mulder would come back to him. Mulder was in love with him and Zito was the exact same, his muscles skipping at the sight of him, his world narrowed like a telescope turned around backwards.

Mulder didn’t want to say anything out loud. He didn’t want to speak Zito’s name or touch his face, but he did both, wincing because it came from somewhere beyond his control, and Mulder just fucking _hated_ that. He wanted them to be fuckbuddies and not a moment more, but three months ago, he’d started spending the night in Zito’s bed and hanging around Zito’s place on long off-days with his bent knee resting atop Zito’s leg. Zito had started waking up with a curve of Mulder’s fingerprints on his sides.

Three months ago, Mulder started asking for Zito in his sleep, and Zito would put an arm across his chest and mutter, “god, shut up,” watching Mulder’s closed eyes flicker.

Zito lived for this. Baseball was a pale obsession; Mulder was everything.

Two nights before, Zito had been joyful and redeemed, because Mulder had laughed hard enough for Sprite to come out of his nose at something he’d said. Mulder’s eyes were bloodshot, and he was trembling, still kinda laughing.

Zito did not have a choice. You couldn’t kill yourself by holding your breath. He said it into Mulder’s neck, muffled and almost lost (and christ, imagine if Mulder had never heard, imagine if none of this had ever happened), “love you.”

Felt Mulder tense quick as a guitar string, big hands wide on Zito’s back, and Zito was happy for a moment because he’d said it and now it was in the air forever. It was out of him at last, no longer a cancer inside.

 _You don’t know what you’re fucking talking about._

Hungover, hiding from the sports page, Zito didn’t realize the world was ending outside until past dinnertime. He’d lost his cell phone at some point, it could be in Guam or his coat pocket, either way capturing message after dozen messages without his awareness. He was twisted up, leaving Mulder alone because Mulder needed some time to think, to get the fuck over himself, to realize that it was okay, being in love with a left-handed pitcher, it wasn’t all bad luck.

And you shouldn’t pitch angry or heartbroken, it was the only good rule.

Difficult, wanting Mulder in the palms of his hands and the beat of pulse in his temple. The drive over the bridge was like a six-mile drop out of the sky, end up on Mulder’s doorstep all fucked up and shirtless, stupid dreams that Zito had.

He found out from SportsCenter. Anthony Pearl was a reporter with a photographic memory and now Mulder and Zito were a punchline. Zito’s mouth stretched in a weird smile when the story came on, like that could remove the hallucination and wake him up in reality again. It wasn’t possible. No one knew. Even the two of them barely knew.

But it was right there in white letters on a red background, and some second baseman was talking about how it shouldn’t matter, some pitcher was saying that they should be kicked out of the game. Opinions were split, an online poll cut almost perfectly down the middle, like a fastball that got away.

Zito shook his head, his throat closed up tight enough that every breath whistled, and fuck oxygen for keeping him alive right now. It wasn’t possible.

A half-hour later, Mulder was slamming his fist on Zito’s door and the room shuddered. Zito did the same. Zito could feel the simple nature of his life—play baseball, be charming, be in love—slithering through his fingers.

Mulder’s face was torn and his eyes were crazy like the one time when Zito’s grip on the headboard had slipped and he’d caught his weight on Mulder’s left shoulder, thirty-six hours after Mulder’s last start. Zito had never been afraid of him, only wanted to keep him around every day and not miss a moment, but things were being upended. There were forces inside him that couldn’t be fought, and forces inside Mulder too, as Mulder threw him against the wall.

Funny to hear the crack of his back into the plaster more clearly than Mulder’s voice in that moment.

Zito couldn’t explain. He tried, his very best, nine beers, man, didn’t know he was a reporter, I don’t remember, I don’t think I said anything. But Pearl had recreated Zito’s inflection easily. Zito’s whole personality bled out of the newspaper. Mulder knew him better than anyone.

A cold thrill struck in Zito’s chest when Mulder told him, “It doesn’t matter what we do from now on, all that counts is that we fucked.” Mulder had admitted it, finally, finally, after all these months of showing up in Zito’s hotel room wordlessly, subtly moving into his house without ceremony, confirmation at last that it was real. It wasn’t just an incredibly elaborate daydream, as sometimes seemed the case when Mulder was mid-game and not looking at him.

Dumb thing to think, and Mulder was so angry with him, his voice creaking and scraped like limping on old floorboards: “You’ve ruined my life.”

Zito didn’t understand. They were going to be okay, this was just temporary, a four-game losing streak in May. They bounced back from shit like this. They’d always been a second-half team, anyway.

Mulder didn’t listen, he didn’t want to hear it. He wanted Zito to be something other than what he was, wanted to set the building on fire. Zito said hoarsely, “I can’t not be in love with you, man,” and saw something violent yank across Mulder’s face.

Zito could be just as angry. He could rage back, his fists on Mulder’s chest, his teeth biting centimeters from Mulder’s cheek, you love me too and you’re fucking well going to deal with it. I’m not going to let you leave until you promise nothing’s changed.

He could do that. The words were there, crystallized. Mulder was there, pressing him against the wall as he’d done a hundred times before. The scene was cleanly set, streetlight through the window, a sewed-up tear in the shoulder of Mulder’s shirt, an eyelash on his cheek.

But it was no good. Zito was frozen, sickly fascinated by the spectacle. Mulder wanted to hit him, disfigure him, and Zito kept waiting for it, tilting his chin up. Any damage Mulder’s hands could do to him would fade by morning; Zito’d always patched up quick.

Instead, Mulder left him, saying obscurely as he walked out, “Now I can never be sure of you again.”

Zito didn’t know what that meant. Zito had been a constant from day one, something to set your watch by, and all that had changed was the color of his hair. He cried out, “No, no, you motherfucker,” but of course that didn’t work. Of course Mulder was already gone.

And Zito was dead where he stood.

Swift turnaround to a new day, supposed to be born again but it didn’t count because he hadn’t slept. The reporters would find him, sniff him out, he’d be chased from his home. Billy Beane was going to destroy him. Zito thought for a very long time about running away. Idaho was lovely this time of year.

Trapped in a circuit, he went to the ballpark, crushed his way through the reporters and pretended he didn’t see anything. He walked the hollow tunnel and remembered that they hadn’t even been drunk the first time, though Mulder had long since blocked that out.

They’d been clean as the street after rain, five months ago in Phoenix when Zito had caught Mulder’s eyes and the same old desire grabbed him deep. His game was mental. There were moments when Zito did not believe he could be beaten, not even fouled off, everything was swung-through.

And this moment like all of those, in the orange light, in the kitchen of his rented spring training house with the tile coming up in pieces under his feet. Cracking as he crossed to where Mulder was standing, chill before the wedged-open refrigerator door. Zito had taken Mulder’s wrist and pinned it to the counter and pressed up against his back, his hand winding under the waistband of Mulder’s shorts. Mulder had gasped, dropped his Coke. Zito licked the back of his neck, soft bitter taste of sunscreen, felt Mulder’s back arch against his chest, and Zito held him still, fingers around Mulder’s wrist, fingers around Mulder’s cock, soda seeping through his socks.

But they hadn’t been drinking, which was the important thing to remember, more than the sunlight or the way the skin of Mulder’s stomach was so cold to the touch. They’d gotten started five months ago, in Phoenix, during spring training, and for that to go like this, to shatter like knuckles in a bar fight, it seemed unholy.

They’d been perfect for a very long time. Even wrapped up in violence and rivalry as they were, they’d melted down and been reformed and that was okay. The course of their season flowed up and sank down and Zito had woken up in the middle of the night to Mulder’s mouth open on his back, air warmed by his body.

Quick like that, over like this, and his teammates didn’t know what to say to him. Eric Chavez and Tim Hudson looked betrayed. Eric Byrnes combed his hair for fifteen minutes straight rather than coming over to play cards with him. Nobody would meet his eyes, and Zito barricaded himself away in a side room with his headphones on and the lights off. He could hear them talking out there in the pauses between songs, saying his name and Mulder’s name, saying, “Fuck, never would have thought.”

Staring hard at the vent high up on the wall, Zito wished himself forward, three months or so, to a place where it would have blown over and the season would be behind him. And he could put this behind him, too, like a bad start, a disastered training room. Develop willful unconsciousness, only come to once every five days.

They came and got him after the position players had gone up for infield practice. Shuffling and looking everywhere but at him, they said Beane was waiting for him and Zito rose without thought.

He would face it. He would get thrown off the team, kicked out of California, wander the earth. Never wear a uniform again. It was almost enough to look forward to.

But Mulder was up in Beane’s office too, of course, as he would be, and that shook Zito like dice. His resolve abruptly vanished. Mulder stood hard as a tree, hands deep in his pockets. Zito glanced at the flushed line of Mulder’s neck and then turned his eyes away.

Beane dismantled them efficiently. Broke them down until the situation was clear, and Mulder was glaring at Zito, fired into the side of his face. Zito was falling.

There was an instant, a breath, when he thought he’d be able to do it. Stand there next to Mulder and look Billy Beane in the eye and tell him, yes it’s true. Yes I love him. Forever and ever. Zito could remember being a kid and whispering that to himself, forever and ever, over and over again until the words lost all meaning.

He could have done it. He might even have lived. But Mulder would see him killed by nightfall, anyway, and so Zito lifted his head, steeled his gaze, smirked his mouth.

Told Beane that it had just been a joke.

Zito sold it. Pitching was mental, and pitching was deception, and this was the best change-up the world had ever seen. Mulder was staring at him in shock, as Zito shrugged bashfully and apologized for fucking with the press. Though both their eyes were stark and bright upon him, Zito couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being slowly erased.

Beane took a huge too-early hack, believing all of it, and laughed, clapped Zito’s arm in relief, planning the press conference out loud. Zito’s legs held up until Beane was out of the room, and then he fell, crumpled like paper on the floor.

And Mulder was saying his name, awkward crouching shadow beside him, his hand hovering and Zito twisted, tunneled into Mulder’s touch. Mulder’s hand clung, surprised for a moment in Zito’s hair, before he jerked away. Zito hissed at the pain, balled up around his knees. Zito swore out loud that he hated him, said it until the words echoed around his mind and Mulder’s face was stricken.

Mulder thanked him anyway, brushed his fingertips on the back of Zito’s neck, dug the spurs in clean down to the bone.

Days passed. Zito wasn’t sure. Professional baseball and the national press took him at his word; Zito was not used to that. Mulder followed along admirably, smiling when Zito smiled, nodding in rhythm, agreeing with everything: of course it’s ridiculous, of course he was kidding.

Of course. Zito recognized the strain of self-destruction that pulled him back by the hair occasionally, and he’d searched for it desperately when he and Mulder had first gotten started. He’d expected to find linked sixes behind Mulder’s ear, skywriting to show him the way, prophetic dreams of fire. It would have made more sense if Mulder was just another symptom of Zito being not quite sane. It would have been easier to deal with.

But Mulder had growled at him when Zito stole pillows. Mulder had made hotel rooms feel new and exciting again, sucking on Zito’s hip, skidding his hands on the sheets. Mulder had been bad luck, wasted Zito’s time and ate his food, but at the end of the day Mulder would still be close enough to touch.

Mulder wasn’t a suicidal tendency at all. He was the fucking love of Zito’s life. Zito wasn’t anything anymore.

They came home to fog and Zito couldn’t remember sleeping, or whether the sun had risen that morning. Mulder was tall enough to be seen over everyone else, and Zito kept scrunching one eye closed. Bam, and you’ve disappeared. Bam, and there’s not even smoke left where you used to be.

Stretched high and thin by the strain of each day, Zito couldn’t catch his hands on anything. Mulder was watching him with burnt shadows under his eyes, licking his lips and Zito was obsessed with his mouth. Sometimes Mulder tilted towards him like his equilibrium was fucked up, like drunk was the best way to be.

Zito dreamt of coming home one night and finding Mulder asleep on his front steps. Cubed blue pieces of windshield glass on the streets, big full autumn moon shining through Mulder’s fingers, tattered duct tape holding Zito’s shoes together.

But it wasn’t going to be like that. It wasn’t a fucking fairy tale and there’d never been anywhere for them to go together, anyway. They just happened to be on the same team; it didn’t mean anything.

None of it meant anything. Zito could learn to accept that, if Mulder would just give him some time and quit looking at him when he thought Zito wasn’t paying attention.

They backslid in September, better than a month after Zito had wrecked everything.

They were in some East Coast city that looked familiar. The fans yelled ‘faggot’ and even worse things at Zito as he took the field, which made him very tired. They only rarely yelled the same at Mulder, and that didn’t seem particularly fair.

Neither of them pitched, and the game was lost. They were doing that a lot lately. There was a minor lightning storm that scissored the sky and made the air smell like sulfur, and Zito couldn’t keep his distance at the bar. He’d had years of Mulder always within arm’s reach, like his shadow glued to his feet, the birthmark painted on his wrist, the idiotic doubt that turned him inward and made his curve go flat.

Mulder, his single worst shortcoming. Couldn’t even fall in love with a regular person. Had to try for a hundred miles too high. Story of his fucking life.

So maybe it was okay that Zito leaned into him and rested his cheek on Mulder’s back and pretended that they weren’t enemies. It was definitely okay that Chavez yanked Zito off, muttering hotly under his breath about appearances and you want to get into fucking trouble again?

Mulder looked back at him with something banked in his eyes like clouds holding back rain. Used to seeing pure anger in there, Zito smiled at him, vaguely wanting to cry. Mulder flushed and jerked his head away.

Two hours later, Mulder found him in the corner and stared at the floor, mumbled something about watching tape. Zito wanted to laugh, scratch Mulder’s eyes out, something like that. As if Zito didn’t know that look on Mulder’s downturned face, the bunch of his hands in his pockets, the fault line across his forehead. Mulder was unsteady and miserable and wanted to fuck Zito again. Zito’d seen it a million times.

He might have done anything, but instead he just agreed too fast, ignoring the huddled tension in Mulder’s back and the fact that they were both kinda drunk. They walked back to the hotel in silence.

Dry brown leaves in his hair, Zito thought that it wasn’t right. If it was gonna happen, it should be sudden and without warning. They should be drunker than they were and far gone from their senses, something to blame in the morning. This was too premeditated. They were taking too much time.

Mulder put the tape in and sat cross-legged on the bed. Zito got the Elmer’s glue that Mulder put on his blisters and took the chair, carefully applying the glue to his fingertips, blowing to make it dry. He wasn’t paying attention to anything, and Mulder said his name low in the old way, as Zito had known he would. Zito wouldn’t look back at him. They hated each other. They were relearning friendship, or maybe learning it for the first time. Either way.

Mulder had made him smile into the cameras and deny it. Zito didn’t even _want_ to forgive him.

Zito peeled off the pieces of dried glue and laid them out in an arch on the table, a rainbow of his fingerprints. Looking at them made his throat hurt in a weird way, thinking that this was the only part of him that was unique from everybody else. The whole world knew about not being able to wake up all the way up, about not being able to stay away. Heartbreak didn’t make him special. He swallowed with a click and lowered his head into his hands.

Mulder said his name again, stirred behind him. Zito dug his fingers through his hair, trembling fast and drunk, not drunk enough. Mulder put his hand on Zito’s back and Zito flinched so hard he almost fell out of the chair.

“No, hey,” Mulder said, and kissed the back of his neck. Zito shuddered, turning into it, and Mulder’s mouth was on his throat, under his ear.

“Can we just,” Mulder started, then stopped. He tugged at Zito’s arm, trying to get him to drop his hands, but Zito was safe like this, nobody could see him. He wondered if he could get Mulder to fuck him with his hands still over his face. He thought Mulder probably would.

But Mulder whispered, “please,” with his thumbs in the spaces between Zito’s fingers, touching his eyelids, and Zito couldn’t stand hearing him say that, flat and dull like it had been recorded off the radio. He took down his hands. Kissed Mulder until the room shook.

Fell down onto the carpet with him and forgot for a little while.

Zito awoke in the bed, sore and wrung out. He found bruises on the backs of his arms and the insides of his thighs, tumbling his fingers over them like calligraphy. There was a shuffle in Zito’s chest, mix-up of sadness and joy and the groundless feeling of being forgiven. He could hear Mulder in the shower.

For a minute or two, Zito imagined staying. Seeing Mulder emerge wet and red-skinned in a cloud of steam, smile and use his hands and mouth until Mulder agreed to go in reverse.

But it would never work. Mulder was as stubborn as wood and Zito couldn’t believe in something that had already been disproved. He needed to get out of here. He was supposed to be in recovery, not in Mulder’s hotel room.

Zito got up and dressed quickly, treacherous hands remembering the slide of Mulder’s back. Zito wanted to be worked over as a crime scene, DNA evidence to prove that Mulder had touched him again. He was halfway out the door when a humid wave from the shower hit him and Mulder was asking easily, “Where are you-” before he remembered and cut himself short.

Resting his forehead on the door, Zito catalogued the many ways that Mulder was still on him. Teethmarks, fingerprints, bruises from Mulder’s hands and hipbones, his voice echoing, his breath crashing like laughter into Zito’s neck.

Mulder cleared his throat. “You going, or what?”

Zito shook his head, but that didn’t make anything clear. He wondered if Mulder was in a towel or boxers or what, standing in the bathroom doorway behind him. He wondered what Mulder would say if he turned around and asked, what if I’d never met Anthony Pearl and never fucked it up, what would you have promised me?

But how could Mulder know the answer to that? Mulder wasn’t that smart, couldn’t see the future or change it or block it out, and every time Zito had woken up, all night long, Mulder had been motionless and wide-eyed in the bed next to him, looking like he hadn’t slept in a month either. Maybe everybody was going crazy. Maybe it was a virus.

Zito whispered too low for Mulder to hear, “Yeah, I’m going,” and walked out on him.

Continue on like this, drag the days like dead cars, and Zito was living for the next time that they would be drunk as the planets aligned and the second full moon of the month filled up the sky all blue and solemn. Most people only get one extra night after the end of everything, but the two of them had never really been on the same kind of clock.

Mulder got better at being in Zito’s proximity, anxiety smoothed like a palm over wet hair. That was probably just a good act, but Zito could barely keep himself upright, so he was hardly in a place to nitpick. Mulder was slowly transforming back into the man Zito had first met, shoulders blocking out huge chunks of the ceiling, flicker-free eyes colored like faded sunbleached blue paint.

Zito was terrified. Mulder would heal, pretend he was okay until it was true, and Zito would still be right here.

He found himself at Anthony Pearl’s apartment very late one night. He wasn’t there for revenge, though it took a long time to convince the reporter of that. Zito knocked over a stack of books and asked him why, why’d you write that fucking story, ruining Mark Mulder’s career for the second time in one season. But Anthony Pearl had been reduced to covering the Rivercats, and with his own disillusionment shining bright, he made a good case for love and other things that couldn’t be harmed by the press.

Zito knew that there weren’t guidelines for what could hurt you and what couldn’t. Life was forever kicking him in the shins. Even dumb things made him want to break down, as if beauty wasn’t enough and neither was happiness and neither was baseball. Even off-speed pitches thocked into his heart. His body was carved over with landmarks from every one.

But Pearl told him, “You love him and he loves you and I couldn’t touch that,” believing it plainly with his eyes magnified through his glasses.

Zito rolled it over in his mind, I love him and he loves me and they can’t touch that. It didn’t sound right.

Gut-shot, Zito wanted to know what he should do. Pearl said like it was so self-evident, like maybe Zito was a little slow, “You make it right again, man. You go and get him back,” and that sounded better.

Across the bridge one more time in the wicked autumn wind, Zito was raised high up and the magic of it, this pretty Hollywood moment, fled through him like brand-new blood. He was going to set everything straight and make it clear to Mulder that he wasn’t going to allow them to be without each other anymore. The option was no longer on the table.

He could think of a thousand other means by which their repair might have come, most of them involving Mulder coming to find him and professing some impossibly out-of-character speech about true love and regret, but this had been written out for him. Zito was going through the motions, smiling only when he was cued.

Zito didn’t want to wake up the whole house, so he shimmied through the kitchen window and left his shoes by the refrigerator. Padding silently down the hall, his pulse bumped in his throat. He repeated to himself on a loop, I love him and he loves me and they can’t touch that. He would pretend until it was true.

Mulder wasn’t asleep. He jerked up when Zito snuck into his room, firelight whites of his eyes reflecting the red of the alarm clock. Mulder’s mouth moved without sound in the shape of Zito’s name, his hands wrenched in the sheets.

Zito crawled right onto the bed, paying no attention to the way Mulder snatched away from him.

“I figured it out,” Zito told him, very quietly. “This was an awful idea. You don’t hate me at all.”

Mulder gaped at him. Zito had always liked that look on him, and he grinned, leaned down to kiss Mulder’s elbow, which was closest to him.

“It’s okay that I fucked up, dude, can’t you see? Because we can’t live like this, and now we know. It would have taken us years otherwise. But, look.”

Zito tunneled his hand under the covers and laid his fingers on Mulder’s stomach, skidding under the waistband of Mulder’s boxers and touching the indented skin there. He made his eyes go wide, waiting for Mulder to fall in.

“I don’t need anything from you. I did a terrible thing, but you did too, so, now we go back, okay? Now we’re even.”

Mulder put his hand on Zito’s, stopping him when Zito might have gone farther down. Zito felt the supports in his chest being knocked out one by one, his throat shrinking down to nothing. Mulder was staring at him like a front-row seat to the end of the world.

“Barry,” Mulder breathed out, and Zito panicked, because Mulder never called him by his first name. They weren’t _friends_. “You can’t, just. You can’t.”

Zito bit the insides of his cheeks hard, clenching Mulder’s hip, hating that he couldn’t see it. His knees were starting to ache from kneeling on the bed. “I already did. This, Mulder, please. Love you. Like nothing else. And. You too. Please. This is how I get you back.”

And Mulder blinked, something cold and blue shattered clean in his eyes. He pulled Zito’s hand off him. He shook his head. “You never had me in the first place, babe,” he told Zito softly. “We weren’t. What you thought.”

He touched his fingertips on Zito’s chest and sucked his cheek in and that meant he was lying. Zito knew all the signs. But vision was for shit because Mulder was saying, “So go home and sleep it off, okay?” and pushing Zito away from him, five small spots of pressure the size of dimes and hot as iron, forming a semi-circle around Zito’s heart.

Zito would have it with him forever, stumbling out of the house in shock with his ribs crushed. Zito knew how to pitch on two-and-oh and how to walk off the field after allowing six runs. He knew how to tell when Mulder wanted to fuck him and how to tell when Mulder was lying, how to break a fall and how to get home from here. All of that had gotten him so far, and it was too late to realize now that he’d never learned how to breathe with this much water over his head.

THE END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title and the line from whence it came borrowed from "Song for My Stepfather," the saddest Mountain Goats song of them all.


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